


Wild Hunts

by Iambic



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Adoribull Minibang 2015, Dark, Fairy Tale Retellings, Horror, M/M, Minor Character Death, Non-Sexual Slavery, Tam Lin - Freeform, additional characters later on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-21 04:21:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 48,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4814834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iambic/pseuds/Iambic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Wild Hunts: Tracking the Genealogy of “The Last Scion of Pavus”</i> by Iacomus Actus<br/>An exploration of ancient age narrative shift over subsequent ages, exemplified through tracing retellings as far backwards as they exist, accompanied by Amelior Aclassi's adaptation of the tale she recorded as a point of comparison.</p><p>Or: in which Dorian Pavus meets a supposedly fictional Qunari in the midst of his house arrest, and what starts out a temporary companionship forces them both to choose between what they are and who they have become.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The North Wind

**Author's Note:**

> _“Wild Hunts” seeks to trace the Ancient Age tale of “The Last Scion of Pavus” through its drift over the subsequent ages, drawing from oral tradition, classic works of theatre, song, poetry, and literature, archaeological examination, and preexisting studies. Through breaking these disparate sources down to their basic components, modifying for historical context, and filtering each retelling for common denominators, this dissertation presents as close a narrative to the original as can be gathered from derivative sources, and possible explanations for such drifts that occur over time, by region and class, and embellishment._
> 
>  
> 
>  -
> 
> Praise for Aclassi's _Heir to the Wind_  
>  "Dramatic... definitely going to cause a stir in certain uptight circles." – Varric Tethras, author of _The Tale of the Champion_  
>  "An ingenuous reinterpretation of a classic myth, lending humanity and a visceral lens so often forgotten in the telling." – Brother Genitivi, historian  
> "Spiraled rapidly out of control... the evil twin to [this story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4665987)." – [tofsla](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/tofsla), author of _The Four Flowers_ , the parallel tale to _Wild Hunts_  
>  "Four scarves fluttered in shock out of five." – _The Randy Dowager Quarterly_

_The North Wind is generally thought to originate as a tale to frighten children into coming inside at night or during inclement weather(iii). To the furthest, warmest reaches of the north, it is said, there is a lush land of ruins and dormant ancient power. Long ago, a fierce people(iv) from the other side of the endless ocean thought to cross from their world to ours. But ancient gods(v) had once been driven from these islands long before the northerners disembarked, and left behind a curse. The northern people, taking their first steps upon this new ground, were transformed into fearsome beasts, and bound to the whim of the wind._

_But the curse was not simply laid upon these interlopers. The wrath of the ancient ones fell upon the Tevinter Imperium below, who dared build upon their old roads, who had the audacity to see their cities thrive while the ancient cities had fallen to ruin(vi). And so it was that the wind carried the beasts of the north to Tevinter, and left destruction in their wake. But such legends, if true, cannot be proven, for the North Wind no longer brings ruin beyond the storms that cross our coastlines._

-

Lord Pavus of Vyrantium had a willful son, and no other children to pass along the family name. The son, Dorian, had little interest in finding a wife, and him already long past the ideal marriage age. Naturally, Lord Pavus took it upon himself to locate a daughter-in-law instead, a girl from a politically strategic family with magic strong in her blood, who might bear more children than his own wife.

The truth of the matter was that Dorian had no care for respectability, and when he was not scandalizing Lord Pavus’ peers he would immerse himself in his studies. Obscure magics with little application to his station – even in his study of theory, he strayed from proper inquiries regarding the nature of thaumaturgy into the stuff of legend.

The walls of Dorian’s room held shelf upon shelf of old, dusty tomes, and more books still littered the floor, piled next to the bad, and stacked upon the desk. There, by the sun through his north-facing window and later by candlelight, Dorian flicked through delicate pages, chasing the history of a phenomenon so often neglected by the otherwise very thorough scholars of Tevene folklore. But despite its academic obscurity, every child born of magic feared the North Wind.

A night much like the others, Dorian’s final candle began to gutter. The sky, thick with clouds, gave no evidence of how long the night had lasted, but Dorian’s eyes felt dry and his mouth tasted sour. He pressed the book open with one hand and with the other, considered the empty mug that once had held a tea of cloves, citrus, and imported arbor blessing. Another luxury of his station, and one his mother frowned upon – which he would admit to himself only heightened his appreciation for the stuff. It would be simple to brew a fresh cup, but Lord Pavus had requested his presence in the morning, and it wouldn’t do to arrive incapacitated. His father was difficult enough to navigate at Dorian’s best.

He marked his page and snuffed the candle, but in the darkened room he paused. Out the window, in the jungle beyond the Pavus grounds, some manner of mist curled, glowing as if lit from within. Magic, but foreign, and far too close to the mansion. Dorian’s hand curled upon the cloak hung from the back of his chair, and he hesitated just a moment. The smoke shifted then, serpentine, and Dorian rose from his seat and took up his cloak. He’d never undressed in the evening, and so only fetched his staff from where it leant against the wall before slipping into the hallway and down the stairs to the ground.

Easing the side door open, Dorian sidled through before closing it just as carefully. Across the lawn the mist still glowed, and now he saw that so did some spot through the trees and undergrowth of the northwestern jungle. His heart began to beat a little faster, but he found himself excited rather than alarmed. Here was some magic or aspect of natural science that eluded the expanse of his knowledge, within the bounds of his house arrest! Perhaps this was to be the makings of his own noteworthy scholarship, or at least a means to access the more specialized scholars who might draw him into their circles.

It was with these thoughts that he strode into the jungle, staff held high and emitting only the faintest light by which he could see his footing. Too bright a light, and the glow marking his destination would fade from his view. And should the glow mark a threat rather than a wonder, he would be seen before seeing.

But the unfamiliar jungle around him was still, quiet. More so than it ought to be, truth be told, but any kind of steady disturbance would cause such a reaction among the wildlife. It did present another peril: no matter how lightly and carefully he stepped, his booted foot would find a twig or a pile of discarded leaves, snapping or rustling. He knew better than to pause and mark his presence, so he steeled himself despite his growing certainty that whatever lay ahead, now barely twelve yards away, would cause no harm to him at all.

The mist emanated from, of all things, a small well in a round clearing. Beyond it, the ruins of a stone wall stood half-crumbled, and beyond that a small fire had been lit – and a hulking silhouette sat before it, leaning against the stone.

Dorian’s breath caught. The size of it, the unmistakable shape of the horns protruding from its skull – this could be none other than a Qunari of the North Wind.

Holding his breath, Dorian thought to back away. Two things stopped him: the first that if he had not been heard, he ought to take very delicate care to keep it this way. The second had little to do with safety, and all to do with fascination. Here he had solid evidence of the validity of his search. If he could observe, if only for a little while – if he could see—

The Qunari rolled its neck, followed by its shoulders, with an impressive accompaniment of the cracks and grinding of joints. Its shoulders fell. This would have been the time to flee the scene, go back to safely abstract research, but Dorian found he couldn’t overcome his need to discover. No one had seen an actual Qunari before.

At least, no one alive.

A deep voice broke through his indecision then. “Well? You planning on staying there all night?” The Qunari had turned its head, so that the fire outlined its – no, _his_ , this was obviously no beast but a sentient being – profile; all crags and what must be scars, a long and broken nose, a crest above his eye that sloped into a flat forehead. Dorian’s heart beat loud in his ears. Caught, the choice became easy: if the Qunari meant to attack, walking away would hardly save him, and even if Dorian managed to clear the forest, he’d be bringing it back to the mansion.

With the element of surprise removed from the table, the best attack would be face-to-face. And if he wasn’t attacked on sight, the risk would be absolutely worth it for what he might learn. So he inhaled deeply, released the breath slowly through his nose, and stepped into the clearing staff in hand.

“Easy now,” the Qunari said, and perhaps he smiled, but that would be a costly assumption to make given the circumstances. Still, Dorian let the staff rest at his side. The Qunari made no move, and after a moment Dorian gave in to curiosity and walked to the near side of the well to peer inside. Where it brushed his face, the mist rising from the well tingled, but the magic steeped in it felt foreign. Inaccessible. It touched Dorian, but did not let itself be touched.

Dorian couldn’t make out the source of it. The well may have stretched down infinitely, for all he could determine, and somehow exploring it with magic seemed a bad idea. He raised his eyes, then, to the Qunari’s face – the face still watching him, only barely illuminated by the mist between them. Enough that Dorian could see his expression, though, and what Dorian could see appeared benevolent, or at least amused. If he had any murderous intentions, he might be amenable to answering a few questions first.

With a steadying breath, Dorian straightened his back. “What is this?”

That elicited a chuckle from the Qunari, and then a beckon toward the fire. When Dorian hesitated, he spoke again: “Come sit down and I’ll tell you. Promise I don’t bite, unless you ask for it first.”

Chances of making such a request slim to none, Dorian sidled over around the right end of the wall, and gingerly sat down by the fire, out of immediate reach but still close enough to see and hear clearly. By the brighter firelight, he could pick out the features of the Qunari’s face – as scarred as Dorian had expected, strong jaw but stronger cheekbones, surprisingly soft mouth surrounded by stubble. A glinting patch covered his left eye, but the deep scars above it and below indicated fairly clearly why it was there.

Dorian would be mortified by how long he’d been staring, usually, but all of this was valuable information. New data. His eyes skimmed over that single eye, though, because it stared straight at him a little too intensely. Dorian swallowed. Finally looked away. Redirecting his gaze to the well and its glowing mist, he said, “All right. I’m sitting. Are you planning to loom over me like that all night?”

“Hey, if that’s what you’re into,” the Qunari replied, somehow giving the impression of a grin without Dorian ever looking back to his face. “But since you asked so nicely. It’s not exactly a well so much as a beacon.”

“A beacon?” The thick of the jungle seemed a poor location – but then again, Dorian _had_ seen the light of it from his bedroom window.

The Qunari looked back over his shoulder for a moment, toward the mist rising up into the night sky. “Yeah. I came here to light it. Gotta leave road markers for the rest of them.”

The rest of them. “You mean the North Wind,” Dorian said. It would hardly be a surprise, for what other reason would a Qunari have to light beacons? Dorian found himself disappointed, even his fascination flagging somewhat – the image of a lone scout, some wanderer of the summer night, had a certain romance to it. Though the Qunari himself didn’t particularly match the image either, once he’d started talking.

“That what you call it?” The Qunari snorted. “Yeah, they’re – we’re – coming through soon enough. Been a while since last time, so I’m guessing the Arishok’s getting antsy.”

Dorian filed the title away, another note to take when he returned home. Though home seemed distant here, far beyond the firelight and the glow of the beacon that defined the edges of the clearing. As if it were some pocket dimension entered via the jungle, only accessible by those who belonged to it. Hadn’t it summoned Dorian here, as if by geas? And only the sound of the fire and their own movement and voices broke the silence, the sound of the jungle at night faded away entirely.

But Dorian’s compulsion had little to do with the subject of his research. “And the reason you blow through?”

The Qunari grinned again, this time visible and therefore a fact. “Sometimes it’s just worth it for the blowing,” he replied, and a moment too late Dorian understood it as an _innuendo_ of all things. He did not blush, but he certainly gaped, and the Qunari chuckled. “But when it’s the whole Beresaad, it’s a hunt.”

“A hunt for what?” Dorian shifted to lean forward in the Qunari’s direction, braced on his knees. Inexplicably, the Qunari looked away to the sky above. He rolled his neck to a chorus of cracking joints, the muscles of his shoulders and chest tightening and relaxing. This, too, fascinated Dorian. The bulk of him dwarfed any human Dorian knew, and Dorian was hardly a small man.

The Qunari looked back before Dorian stopped staring, and another smile curved slowly at the edge of his lips. “Tell you what,” he said. “Come back tomorrow night with something to drink, and I’ll tell you about it.”

-

_Here lies an aspect of truth in the tale. The old roads, or what remain of them, are dotted with ruined wells long since filled in(26). Such landmarks often accompany stone statues, eroded by time, but occasionally adorned with stylized horns. A few only feature stubs of stone, where horns may have jutted out from the statues’ heads long ago. It does seem unlikely that even ancient men of Tevinter would have carved statues depicting what so clearly resemble Qunari. Perhaps they were meant as wards against the threat of the North Wind they believed in. But both statues and wells reveal no secrets, and no record of their construction exists._

-

Both the lack of sleep and the excitement of his encounter the night before left Dorian distracted when he awoke in the late morning. By the time he managed to complete the morning rituals of bathing, breakfast, and beauty, the midday hour had come and gone. His father frowned when Dorian descended the stairs to the front hall.

“I believe I told you we expect a caller this afternoon,” Halward admonished, crossing his arms. A picture of disapproval, he looked, and Dorian knew that expression well. Once Halward took pride in and encouraged Dorian’s relentless study, but it seemed even that had its time limit. Exhaustion, uncaring of the demands made of the only heir of the house of Pavus, blocked the repartee that he might have engaged his father in.

“My apologies,” he said instead. “I happened upon some new material, and was understandably distracted last night.”

A sigh from his father. “Your treatise can wait,” he replied. “Your duties to the family must take precedence at this time. You mother and I have allowed your academic focus, believing as we do that the discipline involved speaks well of you, but you have far exceeded the age at which you should have married.”

So it was to be _that_ sort of caller. Dorian rubbed at the skin between his eyebrows, already feeling a headache coming on. “Surely my cousin—”

“Will marry into another house.” Halward gave up on their standoff and began to pace back and forth in front of the pillar nearest him. “You are the sole son of your generation, and my only heir. It’s long past time you assumed your responsibility.”

“Am I to have no say in the matter?” Dorian leaned against the railing rather than succumb to his father’s pacing. The headache continued to build, now at his temples. He pressed the cold back of one hand to one side, but the chill didn’t last long against the heat of his skin. Perhaps he'd enough time to dunk his head into some cold water and then rearrange his hair afterward.

“Marriage isn’t about what you personally want. It is a commitment, and yes, sometimes a sacrifice, you make in the name of continuing your line.” Halward paused in his pacing to fix both eyes on his son. It took all of Dorian’s willpower not to fidget, but he knew what his father referred to with this particular face of disapproval. This could be a scene from an opera, complete with the scandalous son in tenor and the tragedy awaiting the leading man playing his father. The end of a once-great family! Complete with the wringing of clothes and the wailing of his mother – though Dorian couldn’t picture Aquinea wailing. Dragging him out by his ear, perhaps.

Of course, Halward and Aquinea Pavus despised each other, so that could also easily have been what informed Halward’s speech about sacrifice. Certainly they slept in separate beds, and though they maintained discretion, on certain mornings when Dorian had not yet slept he observed the carriages arrived to fetch whomever had come calling during the night.

“Am I at least to know the identity of whatever unfortunate woman has candidacy for a lifetime of sacrifice in the name of our illustrious line?” Dorian asked, as tart as he could get away with – he’d honed this skill from a young age. Once upon a time it had made his father smile.

But now Halward displayed only remorse. “Dorian,” he said, in a softer voice. As if to make his words go down easier. “I only look to your future. This is not a punishment, only an inheritance.”

 _Does it matter_ , Dorian didn’t ask. He sighed instead, and finished making his way down the steps. Halward looked up at him, still remorseful, until Dorian felt that stab of regret. This was his father, after all, whose love had never been in doubt.

“Livia Herathinos,” Halward said. “That is her name.”

-

_The Herathinos line still exists today, and scholar and amateur alike have combed the family lineage documentation for mention of a relevant Livia in ages past. However, given the popularity of the name, the family trees provide little direction, and no records of betrothal or alliance between houses have survived that predate the Glory Age. Such records, if indeed they existed, in all likelihood would have been lost in the civil war(62) along with many other such pieces of history. Certainly House Herathinos suffered heavy casualties(63) and has yet to rise to the glory attributed to the house since._

-

Hours later, Dorian still hadn’t scrubbed Livia’s perfume from his skin to his satisfaction. The spot his clothing left bare on his arm, where she’d touched him, itched red with hives. He cursed Livia – and then retracted the sentiment instantly. She hadn’t come looking to exploit Dorian’s allergy, after all. She held no blame for the rash that persisted even after Dorian washed the worst of the fragrance away, no matter the assault on his person.

At least a salve of elfroot and dawn lotus had better effect. He stole from his mother’s empty workroom with a small jar of it, and worked it into the rash on his arm while wandering downstairs. Throughout the mansion, he found only darkened rooms; upstairs, neither his mother’s or father’s rooms showed light.

Dorian made a detour through the wine room to select a forgettable brandy as his promised offering, and then returned upstairs to his own room to fetch staff and cloak, and this time ink and vellum. This evening he wasted less time making his exit, less caution crossing the lawn and making his way through the jungle, back toward the beacon, the drifting glow of which shone above the canopy to guide him. Again, no animal stopped him. The Qunari was already watching for him when Dorian broke through the underbrush into the clearing, and smiled in a way that on someone else might have been friendly.

“Knew you’d come running back for more,” he said, with a gravelly chuckle. He did not bother to stand in greeting.

Dorian bristled – but he didn’t return here for pleasantries. “The sacrifices one makes in the pursuit of knowledge.” With a huffed sigh, he retrieved the bottle of brandy from an inside pocket of his cloak, and the Qunari’s single eye lit up. His smile now could comfortably be called anticipatory.

Taking a seat closer to the Qunari than before, Dorian handed the bottle over, and the Qunari plucked the cork out. A long pull later, he wiped his mouth, and offered the bottle back. An unexpected courtesy, and Dorian stared at it for a moment before accepting. He’d shared worse drinks in worse places before. They took it in turns, until Dorian ceased to feel the cold or even the wariness he’d brought with him.

“So,” the Qunari said, re-corking the bottle. “I promised you some answers, and you held up your end of the bargain. I’m all yours.” But he leered at that. Of all things, he seemed to be _flirting_ – some kind of disarming gesture, maybe? Or maybe Qunari, in addition to being fearsome mystic warriors and the alleged enemy of Tevinter, had a thing for humans.

Horribly, he did possess a certain appeal. Powerfully built, he clearly stood at least a head taller than Dorian, and while Dorian had never before considered the prospect of being thrown around, it suddenly needled enticingly at him. And while the Qunari’s ravaged face could be considered beautiful by any means, the angles and ridges had a dangerous charm. Still. Dorian was not so desperate as to find himself particularly tempted, and had the presence of mind to suspect the brandy to have caused his wandering thoughts.

Dorian swallowed. He’d only come back for academic purposes. Pulling out his vellum and pen, he contained himself. “I did ask about the purpose of your hunts. Is there some point to your wanton destruction? The legend involves a curse, but then, the legend claims a great many things you’ve already proven false.”

“That’s more than one question,” the Qunari remarked. “Tell you what. I’ll answer three tonight. You want to come back and drink more tomorrow, I’ll answer three more.”

A complaint lodged itself in Dorian’s throat – but then receded. Irksome as the company proved himself, the Qunari’s opinions were only important so far as they didn’t involve Dorian’s need to die, and he didn’t show any expectations. Even if he did, they wouldn’t matter. Somehow, this made him the most appealing companion present in this place. “I’ll accept that.”

The Qunari leaned back against the deteriorating wall. “So, your first question. If you’ll believe it, we don’t give much of a shit about you humans. Well, we’re not that fond of you Tevinter mages, but you’re the first one I’ve actually met. Usually we just ignore each other, unless they get in the way of the hunt. Even then, that’s just collateral damage.”

A pause, while Dorian took this in. “You knew I’m a mage,” he said after a moment, careful not to phrase it as a question.

“The staff was kind of a dead giveaway,” the Qunari replied, grinning. “Plus, I can smell it on you. Magic stinks. But don’t worry, it’s kind of hot on you.” He closed and opened his eye in some horrendous attempt at a wink, and it charmed Dorian not at all. “We’re hunting deserters. They leave the Qun, they go mad with nothing to give ‘em purpose. So we have to put ‘em down.”

“Your own people?” Dorian realized his mistake instantly. “No, that’s not a question, disregard that.” But the Qunari only waved a lazy hand, _don’t worry about it_. That savage nature he implied seemed completely implausible in the face of such an easygoing man, but then, they probably varied in temperament. Dorian made a note of this at the bottom of the vellum page, an aside.

But his face turned serious when he responded. “They aren’t our people. They left. We call them Tal-Vashoth, which directly translates to ‘true grey ones’ but… for you, it’d mean something like they don’t exist anymore. There’s just something empty and dangerous out there, and it’s our responsibility to get rid of it.”

“But surely there’s still the memory of who they were before,” Dorian pressed. Some log on the fire popped, and he wondered briefly if the Qunari were a mage, if that was a warning. But surely not – he’d complained about the stink. _Though not the stink on you_ , supplied his traitorous mind. Dorian stamped it down. “Even if they’re not that person anymore, isn’t it hard to hunt them down?”

The Qunari watched him for a moment, face not only serious but troubled now, brow furrowed, lower lip pressed out. Maybe the pop in the fire wasn’t a warning, but clearly Dorian had strayed into personal territory.

“Is that your second question?” the Qunari asked, slowly.

The fire popped again, and then Dorian felt the drop on his head, and then another, and more to follow – it had begun to rain. He hadn’t noticed. Somewhere in the distance thunder growled, and he hadn’t brought the oilcloth drape, hadn’t thought to expect rain for another few days. He resigned himself to a soaking, another sacrifice for the sake of knowledge.

Would that be his second question? It was less relevant than he’d have wished, but getting a closer look at the Qunari psyche couldn’t hurt. Even with such a limited sample size. “Yes. Let’s call it that.”

Instead of answering right away, the Qunari turned his face to the fire. Water dripped from his horns, the storm beginning to pick up. “There aren’t individuals under the Qun. That’s the official version. But you can’t live with or fight alongside someone that long before you get attached. Sometimes it’s deeper. They become… kadan. A part of you, I guess.” He paused for a moment to flick water from his hand into the flames. “It’s harder to get your head around them not existing anymore. Death’s better.”

That no doubt had a story behind it, but the details surely would be too personal to ask. It wasn’t as if they were friends themselves, just drinking companions now. Dorian kept silent. If the Qunari happened to have something else to say, he could offer it without prompting.

As it turned out, he did. “That’s the appeal of scouting, I guess. Easier to hunt something when whoever it was before never existed in the first place. Not that it happens all the time, but, enough. You burn out quick out here.” But then he smiled again, the pensive moment gone from wherever it came. “Plus, the scenery’s pretty nice.”

Dorian considered taking another drink. But they’d agreed to save it for another night, and it most likely wouldn’t do for him to get properly drunk here, anyway. “We are a beautiful country,” he said, and offered a smile of his own. “Well, except when we get reduced to rubble by some rampaging horde.”

“Happens to the best of us,” the Qunari snorted. “All right, last question.”

It took Dorian by surprise, and he answered before he could think it over. “Why are you still here? Don’t you have other beacons to light?”

There was just the slightest pause before the Qunari full-on grinned again. “Nah, I’m not the only one out here. Did my part, now I just gotta wait for the full force to pick me up. Figure I might as well enjoy the company while I’m here.”

Rain fell steadily now, flattening Dorian’s hair and dripping down his nose and into his eyes. He obviously made good company still, the delight he was, but the Qunari clearly meant to butter him up. Maybe it gave him a laugh. He couldn’t possibly mean anything by it. “You’re assuming I’ll be back.”

“Hey, you’re the one with all the questions.” The Qunari wiped the water from his face and shook his head, spraying the fire and Dorian alike. In the face of Dorian’s scowl he only laughed again. “And you agreed to come back tomorrow night anyway. Still got plenty of that brandy to drink.”

Dorian had agreed to that. And given his vellum notes – now stowed inside his shirt to preserve the ink as best he could – there would be great use in asking further questions. He’d concede, then, but there was no point in acknowledging it.

“My turn,” said the Qunari. “I never got your name.”

This had not been part of the agreement. “What, you get questions too?”

The Qunari shrugged, with a tip of his horns. “Don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. Seems rude to just call you ‘Vint’ though. Besides, it’ll get confusing if you’re just calling me ‘Qunari.’ They call me the Iron Bull out here, but it’s just ‘Bull’ to you.” He points to his horns to emphasise a very obvious point. Well. Two very obvious points. “It’s closer to what you humans consider a name.”

There was power in a name, but then, this Bull had already shared a drink under agreement with Dorian, so the damage had already been done. “Dorian Pavus,” he said, with a slight but flourished bow. “Mage of the Tevinter Imperium, pariah, and frustrating heir to the family name, so I’m told.”

“That’s a lot of titles,” the Bull replied. “Usually we just get one.”

Dorian laughed, and the natural feeling to it surprised him “Clearly you Qunari are unenlightened. Titles indicate accomplishment, and I am incredibly accomplished.”

The Bull’s next two questions were similarly trivial, but Dorian found himself revealing his academic pursuits and magical study without particular trepidation. Talking to the Bull came worryingly comfortable, somehow, and when Dorian departed sometime later he felt the treacherous twinge of disappointment.

Obviously the brandy as well. Next time he resolved to drink less of it.

-

 _While the authors and playwrights of noble birth often consider their art detached entirely from baser soporati storytelling, both highbrow and lowbrow literature fall into certain patterns and themes. In Theridos’ controversial but much-acclaimed treatise “The Book of Threes”(71),_ _she draws attention to the narrative structure found in oral tradition, prose, and theatrical performance in which an action or decision thrice repeated becomes significant, or bears a unique consequence (Theridos, “The Book of Threes”, articles ii-iv). The earliest transcribed narratives(72), both oral and written, of the Pavus legend restrict the son’s interaction with an aspect of the North Wind to three visits. The debate yet continues(73) concerning whether this was meant to be a finite number, or if the three visits depicted are symbolic of a longer association, the significant developments abbreviated to produce a more concise story._

-

Livia Herathinos comported herself with absolute poise and grace. She made polite small talk with Halward Pavus, murmured sedately with Aquinea without once giving them away by glancing Dorian’s way, and then presented Dorian her unscented hand to kiss. He indulged her. “How lovely your estate is,” she said. “I hear you are in the midst of some grand study.” All carefully distant. “We attended the same academy, briefly, and do you possibly recall?”

At that academy Dorian had made a ruinous display of himself and humiliated several other boys far his senior. One of them had found him later, anger and intrigue in equal measures, and they’d fucked, which was a new experience. So he did not recall a girl who had not played into the scandal of it all. But to say any of this would be a grand faux pas, and so he replied, casually, “Perhaps. It was all so long ago, you see.”

Fortunately Livia looked relieved; it seemed unlikely she would have remembered Dorian either, if the gossip mill had not already broadcast his proclivities. Or perhaps she knew, but did not care – it was, after all, to be an entirely political affair.

She was perfectly pleasant, and not at all deserving of the overwhelming revulsion come over Dorian. Their fingers brushed over dinner, and he only partially controlled his flinch. When she dropped a curtsy goodnight, Dorian bowed stiffly back to her, shoulders seized up and almost aching. He looked up to his mother’s watchful eyes and impassive face.

“A great pleasure,” he said, and Livia smiled and promised to anticipate her return tomorrow.

When the doors closed behind her Dorian sagged against the wall. Aquinea approached with still no hint in her face as to her purpose, but evidence suggested there would be no approval involved.

She came to a halt within reach of Dorian, and tilted his chin up with cool, dry fingers. “These theatrics do not become a man of your age.” Her steel-grey eyes turned cold, dispassionate. “She is an accomplished woman who has earned respect beyond that of her family name, and you will accord her due courtesy. Keep your emotions to yourself. You _will_ do right by her.”

“I bear Livia no ill will,” Dorian replied, and even meant it. But his mother inspected him, lips pursed, and clearly disbelieved.

“Whatever disagreement hangs between you and your father, you will _not_ involve her in it.” Aquinea drew a quick breath as if to continue, but then let it drain away. Her face didn’t precisely soften, but it allowed her a faint amused smile. “And if you must carry away bottles at a time, do consider the Qarinus Mill. That swill you took last night clearly left you useless this morning.”

Dorian did take a bottle of the Qarinus Mill – seven years aged, perfectly suitable – but it stayed in his room as he departed for the third night running. They did have the better part of the swill, after all.

This time he didn’t wait to be waved over, but simply dropped into place against the wall, near the Bull, and let the Bull laugh at him. “In a hurry, are we?” the Bull asked, and such a statement had no need for denial considering the circumstances.

“Another moment in that house and I would have resorted to far more dramatic actions than stealing away into the jungle to drink with something out of legend that most experts say certainly does not exist,” Dorian said, all the frustration he’d been holding in flooding out. “Not to mention I’ve been dying for a drink all day.”

The Bull laughed like he always did, loud and delighted and with his whole body. For a monster out of legend he had a certain vitality beyond most of Dorian’s countrymen, and an openness completely foreign to Tevinter. But he wasn’t a monster in the slightest, Dorian had to admit. A threat, surely, and dangerous, but also a perfectly acceptable drinking companion, and a good conversationalist with no demands for small talk or feigned regard. Even if he _would_ keep flirting horribly.

“Lucky I saved any for you,” the Bull said, but – he was teasing. Somehow Dorian knew. The bottle had rested there against the decrepit wall all day, untouched by the Bull, though surely he must have grown bored in his solitude. And what did Dorian care for his solitude? It was gratitude, only gratitude, that he thought of the Bull at all. Gratitude and academia. And appreciation for the breath of fresh air that the Bull’s company brought.

The bottle of brandy appeared before Dorian’s face. Waved, as it turned out, by the Bull, who looked of all things _concerned_. “Hey, Dorian. You still there?”

Dorian’s hand came up as if by its own volition to accept the offering, and bring it to his lips. Only the sting of alcohol when he forgot to breathe out with the first gulp brought the world back into focus. He took another, steadied himself. The brandy burned, not smooth enough for a soft slide, but it grounded him. It took another moment for him to uncurl his right hand from the bottle’s neck and pass it back with his left.

The Bull accepted it, but his eye still stayed, sharp, on Dorian’s face. He too drank, swallowed with a shifting of neck muscles Dorian somehow couldn’t look away from. Easier than meeting the Bull’s eye. “Something happened today,” the Bull said. It wasn’t a question, so Dorian didn’t have to respond – and he wondered abruptly if the Bull intended it that way.

As irritating as this was, it worked. The Bull already knew enough, and he had no one of interest to tell – what kind of intel would that even make for? Update: Altus disaster, miserable failure of a son, is upset about his life. The secret weapon to destroy the entire Imperium, clearly. No one who knew him would be surprised in the slightest. And regardless of motive, the Bull had given him both space and a way out; that had to count for something.

To the Void with it, then. “Until recently, I was a scholar in Minrathous, studying history, folklore, and thaumaturgical theory, as I had hoped to continue pursuing for the rest of my life.” A sigh for his days with the Alexius family, certain never to return, and for the family themselves, so surely destroyed by Halward Pavus, if only politically.

The dramatic pause Dorian had orchestrated stretched out into something awkward when the Bull didn't reply. He simply waited for Dorian to continue, left arm with its mangled hand propped up against his bent left knee, the other resting in his lap. Dorian looked quickly back up to the Bull's face. “Unfortunately, what with being the only son and all, there was only so much scandal my family could take before they decided I would be better served hidden in a remote summer home and married off at earliest convenience. Thus, my exile.”

Bitterness clipped his voice. _You have disgraced the name of Pavus_ , his father had said, and gone was the sympathy of the days when Dorian in his boyhood had been passed from college to college of magical study. All those words rang hollow now. _It is the nature of greatness to threaten those who only seek it_. If Dorian didn't know better, he would wonder when he could possibly have begun to threaten Halward Pavus.

An irreverent laugh; the Bull grinned for lack of context. “What,” Dorian snapped.

The Bull's grin widened a hair. “Just wondering what counts for a scandal among Tevinter mages. What'd you do, mix up the red wine and the sacrificial blood? Fart in the Magisterium?”

That was no doubt Dorian's cue to launch into banter, maybe even a pleasant distraction. Dorian stiffened instead. Blood on marble floors came to mind, and the laughter of the mage beside the murdered slave, her dark face gone grey and her eyes wide in death. Dorian had fled to vomit somewhere respectable, only the excuse of youthful naivety and overindulgence to save him from the very real danger of being the exception to a party of blood mages.

“I don't kill people to power my spells,” Dorian said, with force. “I don't bleed myself or anyone else. That's vile, and dangerous, and I refuse to be associated with that practice.”

A blink, and then the Iron Bull's grin faded into something soft, shrewd.                                 

He studied Dorian long enough that Dorian had to restrain himself from shifting around in discomfort. “Never met a 'Vint noble outside a fight before.” That stare pierced right through all Dorian's immaculately assumed affectations, as if to read his mind. It pinned him in place. Still smiling, the Bull continued, “Still, I get the feeling you're not too typical among your kind.”

Steady, Dorian told himself, laugh it off. Until proven otherwise, there was no reason to believe the Bull had any powers more unusual than his unsettling gaze. “Did my willing and continued association with a figment of legend who supposedly wants nothing more than to slaughter me give me away?”

The Bull kept smiling at him, but casual again, much to Dorian's relief. Better still, the Bull passed back the unfortunate brandy. “That too,” he said, while Dorian took a long gulp.

In the air above them, the beacon's eerie blue light backlit the smoke of their fire, and Dorian looked to it and sighed. With his own crooked smile, he replied, “Well. That's not the _only_ reason.”

A nod, in the corner of Dorian's eye: the Bull meant for him to continue. He dragged his line of sight back to the fire and then the Bull next to him. Between them, the bottle Dorian hadn't passed all the way across. Etiquette be damned. Dorian took another gulp before handing it off properly.

“Since then he's been trying to marry me off despite my fervent distaste for the whole matter.” Dorian winced. Put into words that way, his problems sounded so petty. “He's succeeded, unfortunately, and the wedding will be held in two weeks and change. With it, the last vestiges of my freedom gone, and it's incompetent childrearing, mutual loathing, and soul-breaking politics for the duration.” Petty and unkind, Dorian thought. Of all women to be bound in misery for the remainder of their lives, Livia was hardly the worst choice. She matched his wit and learning, spoke her mind, shared his interests. Were Dorian a dutiful son, were he less of an _invert_...

He waited for judgement, but found none in the Bull's face, who only considered Dorian again, and left only enough of a pause to indicate he actually considered what he'd listened to. No sign of whatever reaction the Bull must have had. “See, that's what I don't get about you 'Vints,” he said. “There's no method to raising children, no trained tamassrans to assess them, and half the time you don't even mean to have 'em. No attention to complementary bloodlines, just a couple folks with uncontrollable urges they base a committed responsibility on. We don't bother with that romance shit.”

“Neither do the nobles of Tevinter,” Dorian replied. “I'm told that marriage for love is a delusion of the soporati.” He glared at the fire, suddenly angry. The blame for this, too, could be laid at the brandy's feet. No other reason for it. Certainly not toward the Bull, who hadn't even disagreed with him. “But I've seen no evidence that love matches even exist. We just pretend, to be dramatic.”

Only that wasn't completely true. Gereon and Livia Alexius had still felt deeply and fiercely in love; they displayed their caring openly and without shame. They'd held hands over wine with Dorian, smiled at each other but also him. And they'd cultivated in their son a strong heart and open mind. Felix had never hesitated in friendly physical contact, knocking Dorian's arm in humor, excited hugs in celebration, a hand to Dorian's shoulder in times of struggle or doubt. Dorian had never been touched so firmly and freely before, with no intention but sharing unfettered affection. The fleeting touches of the men he had fucked thrilled him, set him on edge; the Alexius variation grounded him. And look what he'd done to them.

An aberration, with the consequences to go with it. Pure things didn't last in the world they inhabited.

The Bull laughed, back in the present. “You should get out of your ivory tower sometime, _mage_. They're pretty common, and even messier. Not really seeing the appeal.”

Dorian sniffed. “Preferable to the way the rest of us do it. There's certainly appeal in actually giving a shit about the person you must live with either way.”

Another light breeze shuffled the leaves and disrupted the smoke and the beacon from their rising. Dorian's right leg began to cramp; he straightened both out before him and crossed his ankles. In all the while, the Bull had only shrugged. “So what's the _Qunari_ approach to romance, then?” he asked, and found his tone unintentionally sharp, defensive, and the continued fueling of the anger he couldn't explain. It was only the last vestiges of his wariness around a Qunari soldier, part of the vanguard of their full force, that stayed Dorian from standing to kick the fire over, or throwing the bottle of cheap brandy across the clearing to shatter across a tree. Something rash like that.

It must have registered with the Bull, whose brows knit close. “We don't.” At Dorian's incredulous stare, he explained: “Tamassrans who raise the kids spend their whole lives perfecting their purpose. There's other branches of tamassran. One takes care of sexual urges – like a healer, basically.”

“And no one loves at all?”

It burned in Dorian, a raw hurt that never seemed to wane. He'd never managed to shake the habit. Rilienus' soft words and the questing hands that found themselves tangled in Dorian's hair had left unbearable tightness in his chest. Every casual touch in public had set the base of his skull to tingling. Gone, now. Dorian hadn't entertained hopes for correspondence, but it'd taken him a while to come to terms of the reality of that loss.

It had been near to a year since he'd been dragged bodily from Rilienus' bed, and despair had eventually congealed to bitterness. He kept the few notes that Rilienus had felt daring enough to leave on the pillow before creeping out into the night, but never opened the box; just one thing his father hadn't been able to take from him. How fortunate, then, never to love at all. How safe, never to risk that kind of betrayal.

But the Bull shook his head to deny this. “Oh, we love our friends. Like I said, the whole no individuality thing breaks down when you get to know other people.” A pull from the bottle, a shrug. Dorian watched the movement of the Bull's throat and waited for envy to set in. Instead, when the Bull caught his gaze and started on a smirk, Dorian wanted only to fight. One swing of his staff would kill the conversation, and then Dorian could lose the physical battle spectacularly before shocking the Bull in place and running hard as he was able to avoid death at the hands of some mild-mannered, shirtless Qunari of the North Wind.

Instead he leaned back against the disintegrating wall and forced his back and shoulder muscles to relax. He saw less success in tamping down the venom in his voice when he said, “Next question.”

The Bull opened his mouth as if to say something, but apparently thought the better of it, closing it again almost immediately thereafter. Whatever amusement he'd found also faded from his face. Not so unflappable after all, Dorian thought, savagely. The fire popped, and he felt his lips spread in a vicious smile. “How does one become a Qunari spy?”

It effectively killed the moment, the Bull's grin resurfacing as if it had never left. “Thinking of converting? Wouldn't really advise it. Life under the Qun's not that forgiving on mages.” He passed the bottle back, and their fingers touched for a moment – surely on purpose. “It'd be a damn shame to see such gorgeous lips stitched up.”

Dorian had just lifted the bottle to drink, and now lowered it again. Despite his cheerful delivery, the Bull seemed to be speaking seriously, and it certainly lined up with the stories. As for Dorian's mouth, well, he wasn't exactly _wrong_. Rather irrelevant to bring it up in this conversation, though.

“You don't _become_ anything,” the Bull continued. “You just are. The tamassrans who raise kids figure out what that is, and then you start learning how do it. Pretty efficient – we're into that.”      

Dorian blinked. “And what if that's not what you want? What if the tamassrans get it wrong? Then you've wasted all that time training.” That anger again. And hadn't he spent a lifetime working toward the academia that he'd thought defined him? Hours of deep research, feverish writing and cross-referencing, shuttling from academy to academy in attempt to find peers and a mentor, the years spent on this very work that brought him to the Bull – all torn from him in the name of being made for something else. A life of chasing one's passions was only for second sons.

Well. He hadn't lost entirely everything. The research he'd compiled, the firsthand account he'd been recording – and here he'd gained, if only briefly, perhaps the best drinking companion he'd yet to find. Despite Dorian's current anger with him.

Said drinking companion shrugged, oblivious to Dorian's roiling inner discourse. “You don't _want_ things. You are, or you're not. If you're not... without purpose, you end up being the kind of thing we go hunting for. You self-destruct, and then you just destroy everything else.”

Ridiculous. One could repress one's desires, or be denied them, but the want wouldn't just go away. A code could call for it, but couldn't possibly take it away from the mind.

On the other hand... staying up all night frantically working or drinking, goading his father, throwing himself against the shoving hand of inevitability, all sounded suspiciously like self-destruction now Dorian thought about it.

There was a disturbing thought. He pushed it from his mind to examine later, on his own. “And the tamassrans?”

Another smile quirked at the corner of the Bull's mouth, despite an utter lack of humor in the topic at hand. “It happens sometimes. Usually it's pretty easy to catch. You get pulled from what you were doing, start training again, start doing what you actually are.” His uneven smile, which actually seemed more a grimace now, winced deeper to the side. “It's harder in the military. Best outcome, it leads to what we call Asala-Taar, and they get brought back to Par Vollen. Typically they don't survive long enough for that, though. Worst case...” His eye went hard. The Bull always looked dangerous, but there was a difference between danger in potential and actually seeing it in his face and posture.

It should have been frightening.

“Tal-Vashoth,” Dorian said, because it calmed him to speak of something less close to home. A wind stirred the leaves that reach into their clearing, and the Bull nodded. It was his turn to take a long pull from the cheap brandy.

“And Asala-Taar?”

The Bull drew in a breath, and then slowly, as if by great effort, his face relaxed. “Most direct translation I know, ‘soul sickness,’ but that’s not it, exactly.” His words ground out as if they, too, required great control. “You see too much of the bad, it gets into your head, and then you can’t get it out.” As he’d inhaled, so now the Bull released his breath, slumping ever so.

A silence fell upon them. The anger didn't so much fade as dull and turn heavy, the energy fueling it used up. Dorian looked up to the lesser moon, just visible around the smoke of the fire and the glow of the beacon. It waned, just shy of the half moon. By the time it waxed full again, Dorian would be locked into a miserable marriage to an entirely undeserving woman, and the Bull off hunting his Tal-Vashoth, and they would never meet again. In the face of that, Dorian's anger, too, seemed petty. And the data gathered from a primary source somehow wasn't the consolation it ought to have been.

“You've still got another question,” the Bull said eventually, startling Dorian from his melancholy. “Unless you want me to take over.”

Dorian looked back to him. The Bull wore a new expression, single eye crinkling as if to smile, but mouth unmoved, and inexplicably did Dorian unbend to it. Something warmed him, a kinder heat than the anger preceding it. He rubbed his own arm, and that warmed too. “No,” he said, “ask away.”

When the Bull scrutinized him again it did nothing to dislodge the newfound relaxation that had come upon him. “All right. Why do you keep coming back to chat? Not that I mind the company, but most of the time people don't stick around to drink or argue with me. Not unless...”

But the Bull cut himself off there. “Plus, I thought you humans did your shit during the day.”

Sober, or possibly only a few minutes ago, Dorian might have bristled, but now he only found himself nervous. There was no sense to it; he'd certainly showed his hand enough already this evening. Who would the Bull tell? What harm indeed in revealing something this inconsequential?

“It's much easier to do my research without interruption.” Not untrue, but Dorian was stalling and he knew it all too well. He persisted nonetheless. “I'm told I won't have the time or energy to spare for theory and folklore once wed. With a primary source around, I may as well take advantage, and–”                         

Too late Dorian caught his unintended innuendo, but the Bull had already begun to grin. “If I'd known _that_ was what you planned on doing here, I would've had you take the bull by the horn the first night,” he said, and actually waggled his eyebrows, as if the truly awful wordplay were not painful enough.

But worst of all, Dorian found himself sputtering without words, drawing himself up without meaning to. “I was about to say something approaching complimentary, you ass!” he squawked, and then spared a moment for utter horror at the sound that had escaped his lips. “I've changed my mind! You are without a doubt the _worst_ drinking companion I've ever had the misfortune to encounter!”

A lie, and Dorian heard it as clear as he'd heard himself avoiding speaking the truth. But a certain energy accompanied it; a challenge to rise to, completely unrelated to anything else that drew him here.

The Bull had paused a moment and abandoned his ridiculous parody of flirtation to really smile, like he truly meant it. “Careful there, big guy. If I didn't know better, I'd start thinking you actually liked me.”

“Shows what you know,” Dorian sniffed, but the Bull clearly grasped his meaning, for his smile only grew.


	2. The Open Mind

_“these roads where wise men fear to tread_  
but followed by the wind  
a guiding light, a mist-lined path  
no augur to determine  
when blows the northern wind

_but followed them the scion of Pavus did_  
and strayed ever afar  
his father, at his wit’s end  
feared the boy become enchanted  
from wandering afar”

_—excerpt from Lastimus Alexius’ famous epic, “The Tragedy of House Pavus” (3:41 Towers)_

-          

The days found a pattern, late nights and late mornings, stolen evenings with the Iron Bull and guilty afternoons with Livia. Dorian visited her in the summer home of her own family, and she served him a truly incredible white wine that, like the recipe for the accompanying soup, came from the territory to the furthest east of the Imperium. A land of backwards magic but excellent food, she said, and Dorian easily agreed.

Livia asked him about his research, previous studies and papers. The abstract theory of time magic specifically caught her attention, and the discussion following actually made for an enjoyable meal together.

“But the consequences of backward travel,” she said, after the plates had been stacked to one side, gesturing expansively with her wine glass. “Surely what has been done cannot be undone.”

“There we come upon the philosophical and ethical considerations.” Dorian smiled with a genuine enthusiasm that he hadn't anticipated feeling during their afternoons. “Would you return to a world changed? Could it be done without irrevocably and forcibly altering the lives of all those living or born within the interim? Or, perhaps, would your actions already have existed before you in your own chronology?”

Livia nodded, sipped at her wine and shifted her hand on the table, that hand which she kept close to Dorian's but never within the area of accidental physical contact. “Thus, the abstract nature of the science, I assume.”

“That, and we're fairly sure it wouldn't work in the first place, or possibly kill the mage attempting it.” Dorian chuckled, mostly a social cue, the ameliorating of a topic heavier than Aquinea Pavus would approve of. Look at the sunlight soaked up by the garden, see our polite smiles! After just the slightest pause, Livia laughed along, though she couldn't have found the topic as amusing at all.

Travel to the future, they agreed, meant nothing to the progression of time, since it wouldn't have happened yet. Livia argued that access to the future in the first place meant that all time must be preordained. Above the roiling mass in his stomach, Dorian mostly observed his rational reply that if this were the case, travel to the future would simply be impossible.

“Things aren't just laid out ahead of schedule to occur in an orderly fashion,” he continued, and pushed his revulsion at the concept back down to fuel the next argument with his father. “That's the whole point of free will.”

Livia only shook her head. “No one has free will. Magisters are bound by their responsibility, alti by our culture, the laetan their duty, and the soporati their inability to fight for or negotiate better lives. Slaves by the people enslaving them. The seasons change, the young turn old, and–” here she smiled without a drop of humor, “the betrothed must wed.”

This time Dorian only barely controlled his flinch. “So they must, I suppose.”

The unfortunate truth: neither he nor Livia had any agency in the matter of their own betrothal. But surely that was the fault of men and not any divine will. Halward had demanded this marriage; the blame lay with him. Surely no divine sense of organization had constructed his visits with the Bull, though. A freak accident he even saw that beacon in the first place.

But try as he might, Dorian couldn't shake the horror that maybe he only believed this out of some misguided attempt at self-defense.

That night he brought a bottle of Alamarri whiskey along instead of the usual brandy. He’d found it dusty and abandoned in the depths of the wine cellar, standing on a barrel, utterly unremarkable, and even if he had much experience with whiskeys, Alamarri or otherwise, he couldn’t say much else about it. An experiment, then. It sloshed enticingly as Dorian climbed over the odd roots and uneven ground of a now-familiar path.

The Bull lately would rise to greet him with a clap on the back or some similarly friendly gesture; this time he took the bottle from Dorian before shepherding him back to the perpetual campfire. A mysterious thing: somehow in less than a fortnight they’d managed to reach perfectly comfortable levels of physical contact. Dorian allowed himself to be steered. When the Bull grinned at him, he smiled back.

“You keep bringing me the good stuff, I’m gonna start feeling like a kept man,” the Bull said after taking the first sip, with a laugh but also a lift of one eyebrow, some kind of heat behind his gaze. There was no reason for Dorian to look away, so he didn’t – and then the moment was good and killed when the Bull closed his single eye in yet another of his failed attempts at a wink. Dorian did not attempt to hide his inelegant snort.

Oh, but Dorian had missed this sort of thing. Languid, he leaned back against the rough wall, arching his own brows in response. “Trust me, were I keeping you, my intentions would be made abundantly clear.” He paused to sample the whiskey, and then to savor the smoky, metallic flavor of it, and its smooth slide down his throat. “Believe me,” he said, “when I tell you that I am a demanding sort of man.”

Traditionally a joke ought to follow, and he held his tongue as a fencing foil honed by long years of rapid sparring and careful maintenance. Dorian watched the Bull’s mouth to catch the moment it opened to speak, catalogued the uneven slant of a smile turned lazy and the ruddy fullness of his lips. It ought not to fit gracefully within the Bull’s coarse and pitted face. Through contemplation Dorian only noticed the silence stretched out too long when the Bull simply hummed, and when he pulled back his focus to the Bull’s face, the Bull was eyeing him, as if Dorian had shown a hand previously unanticipated. “Oh, I trust you."

Some cousin to alarm shivered in the middle region of Dorian’s spine. Whatever the Bull might have figured out, though, he kept to himself. He only tipped his horns, still with that lazy smile, and plucked the bottle of whiskey from Dorian’s momentarily motionless hand. For just an instant their fingers brushed together.

“Well,” said Dorian, hurrying forward on that nervous energy, “should you care to spend your time investigating Minrathous, I would not take anyone’s word for anything, were I you.”

“Think I got better shit to check out these days.” The Bull’s smile curled wider, mouth still shut when he did not speak, and he tapped his nose. “Folks back home seem to buy that anyway. Not a lot of Tal-Vashoth lurking in the Tevinter court, and even if there were, you mages would probably take care of them pretty quick.”

Dorian let the Bull take a second drink, and then held out his hand until the bottle was returned him. “You must have spent time among humans _somewhere_.” A larger mouthful of whiskey burned the throat more than a sip; Dorian took several. “There’s absolutely no way I’m your first.”

A delighted laugh, and the Bull lost his deliberate focus somewhere in his good humor. Dorian, unpinned, took a third gulp before passing back the bottle; the Bull accepted with his eye still dancing. “Aw, don’t tell me you’re disappointed,” he said. “You’re right, though. Gets pretty boring, chasing people who don’t exist. Started looking for some actual nightlife. Even had a bit of a crew toward the end there.” He took a swig, then made a vague wave with the bottle. “Turns out sitting down and sharing a drink is a pretty great way to get past cultural differences.”

The moon continued to wane. Livia continued to maintain a casual distance, and both her father and Halward continued to glare warnings in Dorian’s direction. Aquinea, for her part, nodded curt approval when she passed them in the midst of conversation. If only she weren’t so bent on seeing him married, or so clearly disdainful of his academic tendencies, Dorian might have been inclined to seek out a better relationship with her, if for no reason other than to spite his father.

But she had also condemned him for his _indiscretions_. Dorian had only to close his eyes to revisit the scorn on her face when he’d been dragged home in disarray. Halward had delivered the ultimatum _no son of mine_ , but Aquinea had yanked his face up by the sticky chin and said _my son will not_. The soldiers sent to slaughter their way to him, he’d learned later, had been the result of one of only very few times that Lord and Lady Pavus had ever agreed upon a course of action.

It hung as a cloud over his steps around the manor, in and out of his parents’ watchful gaze. When the tailor showed up from Qarinus city to take his measurements, Aquinea sent Carina, the slave serving as her personal assistant, to chaperone. Carina glared at both Dorian and the tailor the entire time – needlessly, Dorian could have told her, as the tailor was a wizened old man far past twice his age, and Dorian wasn’t about to risk being caught out in his own home anyway. But Carina had no reason to like him, and plenty to hate his guts. The fact that she only casually despised him was, in its uncomfortable way, a great compliment.

Her face only settled to neutral when Aquinea returned an hour later, but the angry tension remained in her rigid fingers clasped behind her back.

“I wonder, sometimes,” Dorian told the Bull that night, “how many of the family slaves only hide their dislike for us out of a sense of obligation.”

The Bull, who’d been reclining against the wall with his head tipped back over the top, kindly offering a view of his obscenely well-muscled neck, straightened sharply. His customary smile had fallen away as well. “Didn’t think you’d be the type for it.”

“Being disliked? You’d be surprised—”

“Keeping slaves.”

Confusion took Dorian for a moment. What the Bull meant by ‘type’ eluded him; certainly every noble family did just that. He knew Dorian to be an altus, and by extension nobility; could this really be such a surprise? “We don’t mistreat them, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

But it had been the wrong thing to say. “Keeping slaves is already the worst thing you could do to them.” His voice, which always had an element of a rumble, dropped into a growl as he sat up completely, shoulders gone tense.

“Better than to leave them to a crueler owner,” Dorian said, finding himself growing defensive. As his best, Halward had always condemned two things above all — blood magic, and the abuse of slaves. He may have grown cruel to Dorian, but his ethics still stood firm, one thing Dorian could still admire about him.

The Bull, though, looked thunderous. He leaned forward, single eye flashing a reflection of the beacon’s blue light. “You can’t _own_ people, Dorian.”

What did some Qunari know about Tevinter? He couldn’t understand marriage, or family, or love. There was no reason he could understand tradition either. So what should it matter, if the Bull didn’t like it? Work distribution under the Qun sounded remarkably similar, after all. Symbiotic, his father always said. One to provide, others to serve.

But there was such judgement in the Bull’s face.

“No one is free,” Dorian snapped, hands curling but not yet fisted. “Surely you of all people should understand!”

“Because I choose to be what I am?” And there it was, the Bull’s voice rising, nerve sighted and hit. “You people don’t even give them a choice!”

“Oh, yes, because ‘accept what you are or cease to exist’ is any different!”

Wild triumph filled Dorian: the Bull’s fury faded to embers, smoldering resentment. Only -- resentment looked a lot more like disappointment, when the Bull looked at him. Not defeat at all. The cessation of sound echoed through the clearing, far louder than the chaos of their fighting, and beyond all reason something quavered underneath the structure of Dorian’s argument.

“Here’s what I think,” said the Bull, quiet but no less harsh for it. “You’re so wrapped up in feeling sorry for yourself, thinking you’ve got no way out, and so you want to believe it’s the same for everyone. You want to think people can be owned, so that you aren’t responsible for yourself, for your own comfort.” He leaned forward, and Dorian hated himself for leaning away. “But if they walk away, if they even physically can, you torture or kill them. If you walk away, all you lose is the life you keep saying you don’t even want.”

Dorian couldn’t look away. He hated the way he desperately wanted to. After all, he’d just been so certain of victory; how had the tables been turned so quickly on him?

“You think you’re like them,” the Bull continued, “but you’re not chained. All you are is scared.”

It welled in him again, that need to strike out, but somehow that would declare his forfeit. Dorian clenched his hands into stillness. Words escaped him in the haze of fury at the presumption of this man, this stranger with no concept of how the world worked or what Dorian’s life entailed. Under the Qun they must surely have people serving the exact same function.

“What would you know,” Dorian bit out, “about chains _or_ fear?”

He didn’t wait for an answer before standing up and stalking away. The Iron Bull could have the bottle Dorian had brought. He certainly had no cause to expect another.

-

_Andraste is widely regarded as a spiritual figure, even to an extent in Tevinter itself, but just as significant as the advent of the Chantry_ – _perhaps even more so_ – _were her vast redistribution of power and construction of nations that came as a result of her campaign against the Imperium. Her holy cause to free the people of Thedas, both of the iron rule of the Magisterium, and the shackles of slavery, left a gaping power vacuum in the south that would be split between Maferath and his three sons._

_But that freedom from bondage has informed southern attitudes toward slavery ever since. Even Orlais and its infamous treatment of elves shies away from outright ownership and, similarly, the Circles of Magi function with more in common to a prison. Tevinter clings defensively to its practice of slavery nearly as much as a symbol of opposition to the practices of the south as it does to sustain the wealthy and the nobility._

_–Sister Maria-Carlota,_ Scars of an Empire

-

Sleep didn’t find him that night. He lay down on the bed before springing up again to pace, nearly tripped over a fallen book and kicked it to the other side of the room – braced his hand against the desk, head down, before pushing off and slamming the adjacent wall.

Of course the Bull couldn’t understand. Why should Dorian expect him to? He had no grasp of the nuance, no understanding of the ability of the trampled poor to elevate their standard of living in a way that no other option allowed. No idea how essential the practice of slavery was to running the Imperium—

That doesn’t make it right, a voice in the Bull’s familiar rumble said.

Livia had said that no one was free. There would always be the destitute and downtrodden, never enough work for all of them. The crippled and the infirm. The single mothers, the orphaned children. They would be released from the bonds of slavery directly into the bonds of poverty, and the only thing that would change would be the job security.

That doesn’t make it _right_.

“What do I care what he thinks?” Dorian muttered, kicking the foot of his bed. “I don’t need his approval.” It sounded less convincing aloud.

With a sigh, he left the bed alone – it had, after all, done nothing wrong – and leaned against the window frame overlooking the orchards. The sky beyond the treeline had begun to fade to pale, giving Dorian’s view a bleak overtone. From here he could see the road that sloped up to the front doors; it too took on a monotone grey. Dorian could, at this hour, dodge the guards and escape. It wouldn’t be easy. The consequences for getting caught would no doubt be severe.

He could, without the threat of becoming _fugitivus_ , walk away. The Pavus slaves could not.

Slavery was a fact of life in the Imperium, from the heart of Minrathous to the conquered south. Most of those who did not own served, or scraped by on some trade or another. But Dorian hadn’t thought much of it, had he? Accepted Halward’s stern lectures about the responsible treatment of slaves, formed his own morals around the example given him – and promptly put the matter out of his head.

The Bull _was_ right. Dorian railed against his captivity and utterly failed to notice the people around him in much more overwhelming restraints. This was how things _were_ – but how things were hadn’t done Dorian many favors, so why should it matter to him? His own comfort, the Bull had said. Dorian hadn’t even had a response to that. Who could be so callous as to put their own comfort before the stolen lives of masses of people?

Dorian Pavus, apparently.

He turned around lean against the wall, tipping his head back to rest on his crown. That was what it came down to, in the end. Believing slavery an acceptable practice because he wanted to believe himself a victim. Arguing it, because he wanted the Bull to think him a good man. What was it Alexius had always said? _The only credit to your character comes from the work you do yourself._

The next night, the bottle he brought was of a high vintage: an answer to his petty thoughts the previous night. He paused to contemplate the boundary of the sloping lawn, where it reached the edge of the jungle and diffused into the mast within. Trees and underbrush thrust feelers, leaves, curving roots into the manicured grass. The step from one sphere into another could be taken without concentration, but no definite line could be drawn between wild land and claimed. The jungle did not cease to be when its trees were cut down and its ground smoothed, or when the house was built, or the gardens laid out in the sunlight. 

Still, there existed a border to be crossed. Taking a breath, Dorian stepped between the trees and left his pride waiting behind him on the lawn.

He cradled the bottle in his right arm and walked slowly around the obstacles he usually climbed over in his impatience. The leaves and branches that brush him give him a source of grounding, keep him in himself and out of his head. Pushing them out of his way doesn’t require thought, but it’s tactile. He can concentrate on the sensation.

The Bull stayed seated and turned to eye him warily as Dorian stepped back into the clearing. If there was a protocol for this kind of return he didn’t know it; one didn’t apologise for one’s actions or admit to having lost an argument. Dorian, when he had attempted it, hadn’t met with much luck – save with Alexius and his family. Not that it had mattered to them, in the end.

Anywhere else, keeping his revelation to himself would be the done thing. Why should it matter that the Bull know about it? But it did nonetheless. Both to share the way a great assumption of his life had been shaken loose to someone who will agree, and because he couldn’t bear the thought of seeing that disgust and disappointment directed at him again.

For his own comfort entirely. But Dorian allowed himself this indulgence.

He didn’t sit down, just stepped closer to the ruined wall so the Bull didn’t need to strain his neck. The words stuck suddenly in his throat, but a long inhale of the humid wind that swirled through the clearing eased their way out. “I’ve been – thinking.”

“Ri-i-ight,” said the Bull without relaxing his guard. For good reason, of course; Dorian hadn’t exactly been receptive to his words yesterday. “Got some new justifications?”

“No, I–” He stopped to take another breath and another step forward. “About what you said.”

The Bull did relax then, if only very slightly. He pointed to Dorian’s usual spot with one horn, so Dorian walked around the wall and back to carefully sit down. Between them firelight danced, dimmer than usual, the wood nearly charred through.

The silence grew from loaded to stifling. No good. Dorian recaptured some of his missing confidence out of nothing but a craving for levity. “You’ll have to forgive the time I’ll need to wrap my head around it,” he said, and took a moment to discard the notion of trying to smile. “And to recover from the great shock. But, as it turns out – you may be in the right this time.”

Now the Bull relaxed further, those vast shoulders dropping from their clench around his neck, but if he was surprised he didn’t show it. “I’m definitely in the right,” he replied, voice nearly mild. “Glad to see you’re coming around.”

Telling, that he didn’t go for the obvious joke. Dorian exhaled through his nose, almost a laugh. “I hadn’t really thought about it before, you know.” The Bull nodded. Of course he knew. “I suppose that doesn’t mean much.”

“Not really.” But the Bull did show the bare scaffolding of a smile. “Good on you for admitting it, though.”

They sat in a less oppressive silence then, Dorian watching the fire because the Bull hadn’t stopped watching him. The presence of that one eye’s gaze pricked at the hairs on the back of his neck and brought his awareness to the edge of his skin. No, this was somehow worse, uncertain ground where Dorian still reacted to the weight of the Bull’s attention without even knowing the intention behind it.

“You were right about more than that,” Dorian admitted, quiet, and hoped for the instant before the Bull replied that he’d been quiet enough to keep it to himself.

But he hadn’t been. The Bull _hmm_ ed. “I said a lot of things.”

Dorian finally looked back up to meet the Bull’s eye, though there was no clue there to give the context of intent to his words, either. Very well; Dorian hadn’t returned intending to take an easy way out. “You said I was afraid.”

A dubious reward: the Bull’s expression softened. And why should he look like that so soon after Dorian revealed such a great and unforeseen flaw as this? Someone had neglected to remind him about actions having consequences, perhaps. Dorian looked away again.

“It’s never gonna be easy, letting go of something you were conditioned to take for granted,” the Bull said, low and soft as his expression had been. “Not easy to swallow that you’re holding yourself back because you’re scared, either. Like I said, good on you.”

Swallowing the Bull’s words wasn’t proving any easier. There was too much – well. There was too much. Dorian deflected. “We can’t have your self-assurance, I suppose.”

The Bull reached across the space between them, not with any speed, but sudden all the same. He brought his hand to Dorian’s shoulder. His thumb brushed the base of Dorian’s neck. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he said, tone as light as the moment charged.

Dorian stayed too late that night, as if to make up for the night before, and lurched home far too soon to morning. It was a mercy no one seemed to notice him; he couldn’t have explained himself if caught. But once safe in his room his thoughts pulled at him, and so he watched the sky slowly wash lighter, back at the windowsill. Exhaustion pulled at his bones and weakened his ligaments, but his thoughts chased each other in and out of focus, and he’d already resigned himself to self-awareness.

The truth of the matter: Dorian wasn’t particularly given to lying to himself. He cared overmuch for accurate data. At his low points, he ignored what he knew or resolved not to let it affect his actions or beliefs, but he thought too much, investigated himself too persistently. Decidedly a consequence of being self-absorbed. He’d been wrong before, and not rarely, but outright denial?

It was a strength of his, albeit an inconvenient one. Here, now, an example – the electricity and chills of anticipation, and the nervous buzzing in his chest and hands and scalp. The grinding burn of _want_. And he had his fantasies, long understood to be implausible, of being overwhelmed and overpowered. In the Iron Bull he found potential, but also deliberate precision of touch, a trust in the Bull’s ability to know his strength. Oh, the attraction frustrated Dorian to no end, but hardly surprised him; in his near to thirty years of existence, he knew what to expect from himself in that regard. And he had certainly sought out far worse circumstances than wanting a friendly monster of legend to fuck him into the jungle floor.

The Bull was nothing of a monster, anyway.

Rather, his thumb had brushed Dorian’s neck and left it still tingling with the contact even now, and whenever Dorian reached up to touch that point of contact something turned over in his chest. And that –  that didn’t feel like lust at all.

Just because Dorian knew this truth hardly meant he knew what to do with it.

It followed him into his sleep, and guided his hand when he awoke tight with need; it accompanied him into the afternoon when he stepped into the garden, late to meet with Livia. It held Dorian in place to wash through him as he stepped to emerge from the hedge to the pagoda where he was to meet with her, and only faded from prominence when he caught his mother’s voice.

He jerked back to safety behind the hedge and its accompanying roses, nearly crashing into it and losing his plausible deniability. By the time he settled himself, Livia had begun to speak. “…Not the sort of mind to take on the Magisterium, unfortunately, and Mother was too caught up on her horse races. I eventually took it upon myself to assume responsibility. Someone needed to.”

A pause, and the clink of silverware on porcelain. “And you have quite clearly thrived while taking on such a challenge,” Aquinea said, with an unfamiliar warmth to her voice. Approval, perhaps, or at least respect. “In the Pavus family, as I suspect you are entirely aware, such political maneuvres require far more subtle execution, but I find that I trust in your ability to meet the challenge.” Aquinea laughed then, as unguarded as she ever allowed, and Dorian had no visual memory to attach to it. “Truly, once my esteemed husband passes, I think it best that you assume his position in the Magisterium. You would make waves amongst those stagnant cowards, I have no doubt at all.”

Dorian nearly came to grief again with a thorny branch caught at his sleeve, recovering only inches from overbalancing into the roses. Consequently he missed Livia’s response in entirety. “Oh, I’m certain,” Aquinea said, as Dorian recovered himself. “But neither do those buffoons who currently govern us. My priorities lie in uplifting another competent woman to spur them into action.” She paused, in that way she often did for the dramatic timing she’d passed on to Dorian. “And you must know by now how unsuitable my son would be in the position.”

There arrived the moment where Dorian had no business or interest continuing to listen in. He knew his faults and flaws without having them recited before him by his mother and his fiancée, whom he’d come to respect and even like as of late. Backing up, this time he made a point of brushing his leg against the side of the hedge where no roses grew, to announce his approach, and then burst with all the drama he could assume into sight of the pagoda.

“ _Terribly_ sorry,” he declared, sauntering into range of the women at the table. “I must have been overly exhausted last night, to be so inexcusably late. I do hope you’ll find it within your hearts to forgive me.” He smiled, too false an expression to subject upon Livia. Consequently Aquinea read straight through him. She refrained from berating him in the presence of Livia, but with a careful arch of one perfectly manicured eyebrow indicated that Dorian would hear of this later.

“I think something could be arranged.” Livia smiled minutely, and acknowledged him with a raise of her glass of iced tea. “I have been kept in good company. Aquinea, you are a formidable woman indeed – I look forward to learning from you.”

A shift of her eyes, just the slightest flicker toward Aquinea, before she looked back to Dorian. Something in that action touched on an instinct, and he stepped nearer her and offered his arm. “Perhaps, to make up for my absence, you would deign to accompany me in walking the orchards?”

His gambled rewarded: Livia’s smile relaxed, and his mother nodded her approval.

Livia stood and turned half to her side to face Aquinea. “If you’ll excuse us?”

They walked the hedge-lined paths in an awkward silence, not close enough to touch but not at a comfortable distance either. Livia kept smiling, though not genuine at all, and didn’t look Dorian’s way until they had left the pagoda far behind.

When they reached the outside of the garden maze, Livia sighed and slumped in on herself in relief. She did turn to Dorian then, rueful. “I must apologize,” she said. “Thank you for providing me an escape.”

Whatever unhappy fate she symbolized, this unanticipated solidarity for a moment offset it completely. “Oh, you know what they say,” Dorian replied, with a bitter but sincere chuckle. “Demonstrate to others what you would have done for you.”

Livia laughed, as she was meant to. “Thank goodness; I worried I would be forced to speak fondly of her after that.”

“Lady Herathinos,” Dorian said, putting a hand to his heart, “I would never repeat your words to me. Trust in, if nothing else, my status as a great pariah; who would even believe me?”

He considered Livia for a moment. She surely had no reason to keep his secrets, either, but divulging his frustrations to the Bull had helped settle him quite a lot. A betrothed couple ought to protect each other’s reputation, or at least arrange for plausible deniability.

“For that matter,” he added, “I feel much the same way.”

The concession was rewarded when Livia’s shoulders relaxed further, and she smiled in what had to be relief. Silence fell as they passed through the end of the garden and into the orchard and its carefully pruned trees – almond here, and oranges beyond them. Here they were in plain view, but one could hope that they would be observed from afar rather than close enough to hear their words. Dorian wouldn’t come to any grief beyond what he already had, of course. But Livia wouldn’t be so lucky. If Halward Pavus got his way, she would be stuck with them until the day she saw them carried into the mausoleum.

They had crossed halfway through the almonds before Livia spoke again. “She must have her virtues as well, though,” she said, pausing and turning to meet Dorian’s eyes. “No one is completely without merit.”

Dorian rubbed a thumb down one side of his mustache, curling it at the end again. At the edge of the orange groves a fruit hung ripe. Mindful of potential watchers, he plucked it and with a flourish presented it to Livia. “She can be extremely charming when she’s a mind to. And you must have noticed her exceedingly sharp mind. Beyond that – she’s a powerful mage in her own right. My father may be in the Magisterium, but her socializing is equally responsible for the glory of House Pavus that I have doing my absolute best to ruin. As she would tell it, anyway.”

“Beyond that, I meant.” The orange, tossed into the air, landed perfectly in Livia’s palm. She then passed it from left hand to right and back again, frowning, obviously not finished speaking. “Does she… is she a decent human being in any capacity? Does she care for you?”

“Oh, not in the slightest,” said Dorian airily, to the deepening of Livia’s frown. “But I am, perhaps, not the best measure of her capacity to care for others.”

“Her own son…” A gusting wind rustled the orchard trees, and behind them a few almonds hit the ground. Livia punctured the orange peel with her thumb, began to peel the skin carefully away. A fully attached spiral granted a wish, the legend went. “How could that be?”

“Quite easily, it turns out.” An accomplishment: Dorian allowed no bitterness to taint his reply. “Her social life and politicking kept her otherwise occupied. And I was my father's son, for all that I resembled her. They have never particularly got on, and that's on a good day.”

Livia nodded, halfway through her second coil. “And she's always been so dismissive of you?”

The smile Dorian offered her had all of his mother's sharpness; another component of their strained relationship may have been that in certain respects they were all too similar. “No. She was quite proud of me in my youth, when the trouble I stirred up took the form of shaming older students with my comparative mastery of my power. It was only when our politics began to differ, and the cause of my infamy shifted.”

Three coils hung from the orange now. Livia sighed. “I had hoped there would be – something about her worth knowing. If I am to become part of the family.”

“If it's any consolation, you'll have me around to draw most of her scorn.” Dorian had somewhat less success avoiding a bitter tone this time, and Livia graced him with a sympathetic pressing together of her eyebrows too near to pity. He sighed. “Oh, don't give me that look, Livia, surely you're familiar with distasteful parents,” he said, sharp as his smile had been before it had faded. “She's a loyal friend if she deems you worthy. She dedicates herself to what needs doing, up to and including not only resigning herself to a loathsome marriage but excelling in the position. Just because she has nothing good to say about _me_ doesn't mean there's nothing good to say about _her_.”

Livia's hand twitched; the last ring of the orange peel tore free. “ _Kaffas_ ,” she muttered. Then, louder: “My parents always cared for me.”

“How very nice for you,” Dorian snapped, already regretting his words before he finished speaking. He sighed, and leaned back against the orange tree. The mantra: _Livia isn’t to blame_. Sometimes it worked better than others.

-

_Across the classes, the taboo nature of certain acts and subjects remains the same. Among the soporati and liberati, however, the greater consequences of embodying them – for instance, a woman bearing a child out of wedlock or at least a committed relationship with the father, or the carnal act between members of the same sex – tend to be far more material. An altus or magister found guilty of such actions would be ostracized, and carry the shame of it with them into any proceeding endeavor. A soporati might find themself denied work, or, frequently, assaulted or removed from their community altogether._

_–Brother Genitivi,_ Contexts II

-

Another night, another discussion. The Bull sprawled against the ground, braced on his right elbow and forearm, and Dorian leaned against the wall as ever, pleasantly tipsy. The question: with whom had the Bull spent time previously in Tevinter?

“There were six of ‘em, mainly,” the Bull said, with a fond smile. “Rowdy bunch, worked for hire, liked a good drink and a better fight. Met ‘em in the middle of nowhere, further south -- they don’t trust anyone above the soporati, and not really them either.” The Bull chuckled. “There was some Avvar fellow, we think – he wasn’t much for talking – and a liberati healer who’d picked up a sword at some point. An exiled dwarf, pretty damn good with explosives, always got work clearing rocks and clay out of some farm or another. And there’s Krem, unwilling deserter from your army, one runaway elven slave, pretty damn scrappy, and her woman, a mage and a free elf, fuck if we knew how.”

 Dorian sat up, those last words ringing in his head. His fingers tensed; with no small effort he relaxed them. “And they just – live openly?” he asked, attempting a casual curiosity. By the eyebrow the Bull raised, he hadn’t even come close. “And they get away with it?”

The Bull chuckled, that fond expression now focused on Dorian. “Oh, don’t get me wrong, they got some shit. But between a mage and a woman that good with knives – they call her ‘Skinner’ for a reason – nothing really came of it.” He paused then, still smiling, too gentle to bear. A lesser man than Dorian might have squirmed; Dorian only looked away. “So yeah, to answer your question, it _is_ possible.”

With a swallow and a deep breath, Dorian regained control of himself. He watched the fire a brief time more until it left spots on his vision, and he looked back to the Bull and forced himself to meet his eye. A new topic was required. “And your unwilling deserter?”

“Not mine,” the Bull said, but not sternly. “Got caught out stuffing his smalls, had to run real quick after that. Nearly got caught, too. That’s how we met.” He rubbed his eyepatch while Dorian read between the lines. Maevaris hadn’t been much well-received ever, but being a magister afforded her a certain amount safety, and her bodyguards took care of the rest.

“But hey,” and here the Bull grinned, “at least he’s happy now.”

“Second question,” Dorian said, familiar ground to tread upon in the midst of that lurching twist of emotion too new to define and the countering miserable resignation. The structure of interview had always anchored them before. But the words that formed in his mind and collected in his throat tasted unfamiliar as he spoke them. “Are _you_ happy, where you are?”

“You talking about in general or right now?” An enigma: the Bull ought to have intended to annoy, dodging the question, or accompanied his words with a leer – anything to wind Dorian up. But he looked thoughtful instead, focused now upon the middle distance, possibly not seeing Dorian at all.

Nothing Dorian cast his eyes upon gave him a confirmation of tone. The fire expanded and contracted with the movement of the air, a breeze slowly growing to a gust. No answer there. A leaf, falling into the clearing, silent. The Bull himself, backlit in blue but a warmer grey in his foreground. Indecision viscerally twisted Dorian's face, and the Bull surely noticed, for he blazed onward. “Under the Qun, fulfillment is a natural result of purpose. But there's the small stuff, too. Jokes, companionship, sex. Cocoa. We're not as boring as we like to think we are.”

Tamassrans for urges, he'd said. But weren’t they women exclusively? Dorian had never outright outlined his tastes, but the Bull was a smart man; he had implied that the Qun wouldn't suit Dorian for reasons beyond his magic, and if this were one such… It wasn’t as if Dorian wanted to convert, even. It shouldn’t be disappointing.

But, perhaps – it’d be nice to know that a place somewhere existed where someone like him wouldn’t have to hide, wouldn’t have to settle for less.

“Right now…” The Bull’s smile, temporarily ignored, softened. His hands spread across his knees only to retract again. Counterpoint to the weight that dulled him, a sharp infuriation sprung into being behind Dorian’s eyes. What right had he, to smile so? “You know – I’m pretty good here, too. Can’t fault the company. And it’s damn relaxing, not having anyone to answer to. Gonna miss it.”

On the clearing floor, indentations and fallen leaves cut jagged shadows, like the scars pitting the Bull’s face. The wind set the fire to dancing, lines and hollows shifting, and chilled the air against the warmth of the clearing. Not long left for their association.

Dorian hadn’t meant to find a friend here.

“Hey,” said the Bull, and he touched Dorian’s arm and left his hand there. Dorian’s gaze lifted in increments, finally to be met with a concern too earnest to weather. He bore it as best he could. Uncertainty pulled at him in the face of something reminiscent of affection, something indefinably significant, and beneath this stirred the nervous coils of want. He suppressed it. Down that avenue lay only frustration and humiliation. The Bull’s expression shifted, gentling in intensity, and asked, “Are you?”

The question was redundant, but Dorian allowed himself an honest answer. “Not really.”

The Bull, with his hand still held to Dorian’s arm, had the gall to swipe his thumb inward and press into the tensed muscle of the corner of Dorian’s shoulder. “You know,” he said, “your family wouldn’t be able to control you if you just stopped obeying. You deserve a better life than what they’ve got you convinced you’re sentenced to.”

“It’s not that simple.” Dorian thought to jerk himself away from the Bull’s hand, but gave the notion up quickly: the Bull had moved his hand to rub at the base of Dorian’s neck, and a stronger man than Dorian would have struggled to give that up. But his argument fell flatter every time he voiced it. A stronger man than he might have taken that to heart; Dorian was not that man. “I can’t just walk away from family. It doesn’t work like that.”

Something else that didn’t cross cultural barriers had the Bull rolling his eye, and Dorian stiffened in his hold and fought down the recurring urge to take a swing at that broken nose. “And why the fuck not?” the Bull asked, and the unaffected air of his whole response took a bellows to that spark of anger against a bitter kindling.

Dorian did yank himself out of reach then. “Because in Tevinter, you love your family!”

All that showed in the Bull’s face was a lack of comprehension, his hand dropping away, and maybe that spurred Dorian on. But maybe it was just the frustration of his situation and how he couldn’t explain it to the Bull in a way that made a difference, or the sense of the clock ticking down their time together being wasted chasing circles. Or just the anger, the resentment, at the Bull’s easy dismissal of all the ways Dorian had suffered at the hands of love. This time, Dorian’s words aimed to cut. “I know your Qun dictates such _efficient_ ways to avoid feeling anything, and I suppose they must actually work – if you’d ever cared about someone, you’d understand how much it _binds_ you!”

With horror Dorian felt tears welling along the bottom of his eyes, and he turned sharply away to blink them into submission. The Bull didn’t respond, and when Dorian had collected himself enough turn back around, he found himself subject to an expression more inscrutable than any before. In the moment he’d looked away, the Bull had pushed himself upright. Helpless in the face of a jagged fury that held him paralysed, Dorian could only stare back. Beside them the fire roared with sudden impossible strength, and Dorian could have set the whole clearing ablaze for one red-sighted moment.

“And that’s enough to give your life up over?”

Finally, _finally_ , Dorian heard an edge to the Bull’s voice, something distantly akin to a growl. The Bull raised his hand, as if to touch, but instead held it steadily between them as if he were waiting for Dorian to knock it away. He wouldn’t get the satisfaction. “It doesn’t really matter,” Dorian said, tight against the effort of calming the fire.

“Like hell it doesn’t,” said the Bull, hard, outstretched hand tensing and releasing before taking Dorian’s shoulder again. Dorian only allowed it because he didn’t do anything but hold. “It matters, it’s your fucking life, it’s the only thing that matters!”

The Bull drew in a breath, then, and the jaw Dorian hadn’t seen clench relaxed. Rising to his knees the Bull shuffled closer, gentled his tongue. “They can’t control what you need. In the end, it’s up to you.”

The words took a moment to sink in, and the rage began to wither in Dorian, displaced by a dull sense of defeat and the slump of exhaustion. His attention fell again on the firelight playing against the crags of the Bull’s face, the edge of his eyepatch, the impossible brightness of his remaining eye. “No,” said Dorian, resigned to whatever disgust the Bull must hold for him now, “it isn’t, really.”

But the Bull’s face slackened, turned sad. “It is. And anyone who tells you different can get fucked.” His hand, heavy on Dorian’s shoulder, shifted in some gesture of comfort Dorian never asked for. “People like that, they don’t deserve your love.”

A scar, two deep gouges, ran from the Bull’s cheekbone, curving, and trailed away just shy of his upper lip. Just another line on the map that covered his body and outlined a history Dorian hadn’t been around to witness. To think Dorian had once thought him anything but beautiful. And so the bitterness Dorian had intended he abandoned for something raw, and gave himself to vulnerability. “And what would _you_ know about my love?”

The rough warmth of the Bull’s hand slid to Dorian’s wrist now, and Dorian’s breath caught. Grey and gold, and that dark eye fixed fierce on his face. “Just a guess,” the Bull said, so somber, turning his fingers to envelope Dorian’s hand.  “Seems like you throw yourself without reserve into things like that. And you don’t let go easy.”

In Dorian’s chest a drum’s pounding seized him, and after a moment’s bewilderment he recognized: fear. He turned his face away yet again. No, this was more than he could stand, he’d allowed the Bull in too far, and now the Bull took him apart as he might some old relic. Why the Bull should care, Dorian dreaded to know.

But he also couldn’t bring himself to pull his hand away.

“Don’t,” he said all in a sharp rush, as the wind buffeted the back of his head, “just, never mind me asking. I clearly should have anticipated I wouldn’t want to hear the answer.” Beyond the clearing, in the dark, the low growth rustled and shifted. Up above, leaves of the canopy rushed and whispered. Dorian shivered with the cold. “Can we, perhaps, stop talking altogether?”

The Bull, when Dorian finally found it in himself to face him again, was watching with soft eye and upturned brow. “I think we can manage that,” he said, and he had no business being so instantly accommodating. Horribly he squeezed Dorian’s hand. “This okay?”

A moment taken for Dorian to flex his free right hand as if that could decide him, and then he abandoned his resistance in a rush of exhalation. “I suppose—”  he started, hesitated, then continued. “I suppose I can live with it.”

-

_Marriages in the modern ages may be annulled with only political ramification, and betrothals are often called off for a variety of acceptable reasons. Surviving accounts(83), however, suggest that the contracts of the ancient ages were far more binding. Well-documented are the bloody feuds which sprung up over their breaking(84), some of which have survived in some manner or another to this day(85). The works of Catritius(85) and the Orlesian playwright Auguste le Veaux(86) present a betrothal continued to serve the son’s cruel machinations culminating in his inevitable betrayal. While suitably tragic and dramatic for the stage, from a historical standpoint the matter may not have been so straightforward. In the recorded oral tradition, even the retellings least sympathetic to the Pavus scion retain nuance with a nod to what indeed could have been an inevitable fate barring drastic and potentially disastrous measures._

-

A few days passed without an afternoon engagement, and left Dorian to his required reading of rhetoric and law. Academic politics, while a useful preparation for the back-door machinations of its participants, wouldn’t help him much in regard to the particulars of the governing body of Tevinter, nor the exponentially higher consequences of verbal missteps and faulty or incomplete knowledge. The texts were fascinating, if a bit dry, but Dorian had always preferred the debating of politics rather than the execution thereof. And ever the weight of the future intended for him lurked at the edges of his attention.

He never took his study to his own room, both to leave it a sanctuary and also to allow his father to see him working; Halward had made it clear he didn’t trust Dorian to report his progress truthfully. In this case his suspicion was clearly founded. Dorian, who took pride in his meticulous note-taking, left the parchment covered instead with diagrams of magical fluctuation. Fanciful sketches, of course. All his measuring equipment he’d left with the Alexius household, even if he’d had a suitable workroom here.

The daytime monotony left him bored to tears, and the late night visits had begun to leave him tense with a kind of nervous energy, so when Livia next came calling he could have embraced her in relief.

Instead he took it upon himself to fetch refreshments. The kitchens bustled when Dorian edged in, and Dorian winced inwardly – he had never even thought to learn how many slaves it took to keep his family in the gourmet food they lived by. He’d never visited the kitchen except by night, and only in passing noticed how spotless and clean it always looked, as if untouched by use.

“Pardon me,” he said to a portly elven woman in an apron, whose hands at least momentarily were free. She flinched to a halt, and turned to him warily.

“My lord?”

It was how she was expected to respond. We’re superior to no one, Dorian had claimed, but he certainly had assumed a level of subservience before. Against that moment of anger at himself, and how it spread to include the whole of his country, Dorian smiled as disarmingly as he knew how. “I don’t mean to disturb, but if I might pass through to—”

The wariness remained etched into her face – no, she wasn’t a nameless property. Dorian interrupted himself. “Wait, before that – what’s your name?”

This didn’t set her at ease any more than before. “Claudia, my lord.” Her voice didn’t tremble, though her trepidation sent the signal loud and clear. She bowed her head. “Whatever I have done wrong, I will amend, my lord.”

“There’s nothing – you’ve done nothing wrong,” Dorian said, quickly. “Claudia. Sorry. I only wished to know if there were any fruit in the cold room, before I attempt to squeeze through the crowd. Melon or citrus, ideally, but so long as there’s something.”

Claudia looked up, dismayed, though her previous alarm had begun to smooth away ever so slightly as she regarded him. “Of course, my lord. Allow me a moment to fetch this for you.”

She had already slid back into the thick of the kitchen slaves before Dorian could protest. Upon further thought, though, that might have been a transgression; for one thing, he couldn’t have navigated the kitchens nearly so gracefully, and for another, if Claudia were any measure, he no doubt would have alarmed a fair few others with his blundering. A dilemma, then, and one for Dorian alone to work out.

Of course he made them uncomfortable. It was the Pavus family, Dorian included, who purported to own them.

Claudia returned a few minutes with a wicker tray that bore a carved melon, bowl of kumquats, and a single lemon; in her other hand a pair of glasses, a bottle of wine hanging from her arm. “Will you be seeing Mistress Herathinos in the garden again?”

“I will,” Dorian said, and then in a flash of understanding, added, “but don’t allow me to inconvenience you. I am capable enough, one hopes, to carry my own refreshments.”

A curious look passed over Claudia’s face, some kind of suspicion before she schooled her face blank again. “As my lord requests,” she replied, and deposited the tray into Dorian’s hands, hanging the glasses between the fingers of his right hand and the bottle on his left arm.

Dorian smiled, and she squinted just as briefly as she’d given him the once over. “At your pleasure,” she added, and Dorian realized she was waiting to be dismissed.

“That will be all, thank you,” he said, and stepped away. Claudia melted instantly back into the bustle.

Once returned to the garden, Dorian laid out his spread to Livia’s curious gratitude.

“You father spoke to me, last time I called,” Livia said over her iced wine, toying with a lemon rind. She’d sucked the flesh from it and then complained it was overly sweet. Fortunate for her, perhaps, that she preferred her fruit sour.

Dorian couldn’t contain his wince. “I am _terribly_ sorry.”

Livia laughed, albeit nervously. “He is an incredibly intelligent man, and a valuable voice of reason within the Magisterium. I hesitate to speak ill of him at all, but…”

“Don’t hesitate to spare my feelings,” Dorian said with a smile only somewhat false. “Whatever you think of him, I’ll no doubt agree.” A pause, to contemplate a kumquat, and then to chew and swallow. “We’re not particularly on the best of terms these days.”

Kumquat consumed, he considered his hands instead. Once immaculate cuticles had torn and healed unevenly, a consequence of clambering through the jungle most nights. Dorian hadn’t painted his nails since his unwilling departure from Minrathous. What use for it? Frivolous adornments impressed no one here, and he lacked anyone in particular to impress through appearances. The Bull certainly didn’t care. Better to save his cosmetics for a future that would require all his armor.

“At least Aquinea seems content to wait for me to make my own mistakes,” Livia says at length. Her eyes flicked to and fro, but she showed no other indication of nerves by now. True enough, what Aquinea had said; Livia made a far better candidate for the Pavus seat on the Magisterium than Dorian ever could. His role would then be the trophy husband, carefully concealing his unpalatable vices under wraps in the name of her reputation. Perhaps murder an enemy of the house or seven. In time, run into the men he’d fucked, now married and firmly ensconced their secrecy or disabused of their youthful proclivities.

How they would talk amongst themselves, throw him unsubtle barbs about how Dorian wasn’t even man enough to hold his own father’s seat. How they would scorn him, even in taking him once again to their beds. Could Livia predict this as well? “Halward, though, he seems to think I will take over for him in running your life,” she was saying, as if to answer the question.

Dorian managed at the last second to redirect his grimace to another smile. “Picked up on that, have you?”

For his troubles Livia fixed him with a shrewd look. It could have been unsettling if Dorian hadn’t been facing down the Bull’s investigations for these several weeks; as it was, he weathered Livia’s easily. “I had wondered,” Livia said, “what might have brought Dorian Pavus, social butterfly and rising scholar, to this remote property. I certainly heard of the scandals, but you never seemed particularly fussed before.” She huffed what given a lighter topic of conversation might have been a laugh, and Dorian mirrored it. “But it wasn’t your decision at all, was it?”

“The unfortunate truth,” Dorian replied. “I’d give much to never—”

He halted mid-sentence, losing the smile he had crafted. Too late to take his words back or cover his misstep now, so he resigned himself to whatever expression had claimed his face.

Livia had the courtesy not to attempt false surprise or conceal her troubled look, in turn. Of course she’d heard the stories, for hadn’t everyone? Thinking on her words to Aquinea, if she handled her family’s business, she must have secured the betrothal herself. For some unknowable reason, she had considered this offer among whatever others she had doubtlessly received, and decided that the debauched disappointment of an heir to a waning house had appealed the most.

In principle, Dorian ought to have been angry; in practice, he felt overwhelmingly small.

“I had hoped…” Livia said after a lengthy pause. An unexpected move: she extended a hand across the table and placed it decisively over Dorian’s. A similarly unexpected miracle: the usual helpless revulsion never surfaced. She’d never deserved it in the first place. “I’d hoped we might have a marriage of friends, no obligations beyond the necessary producing of an heir. I still believe we could make it work. But you wouldn’t be happy, would you?”

“Livia,” Dorian began, and found himself at a loss for words. He stared helplessly at his fiancée, who had hoped to make him _happy_ of all things – happy, like the Bull had wanted for him as well – while Dorian had resented her and counted seconds until he could escape her presence. She’d smiled at him in the orchard and expressed her respect. And Dorian had never once considered what _she_ wanted.

A comprehension had slowly grown within him, and now he thought it in clear words. All things considered, Dorian wasn’t a particularly good person.

Livia was. She only shook her head, said, “It’s all right,” with a quality of kindness Dorian had heard within the Alexius household where he’d learned of unconditional love, and then only once more from—

Cutting through his dismay, Livia continued, “I know it’s nothing to do with me. I think I understand.” She squeezed Dorian’s hand, close enough behind the lurch in his stomach that he might have blamed her words if he’d the mind to. “They never ground the idealist out of you, did they? You never wanted to hide at all.”

Dorian reeled himself back, smiled ruefully, and Livia leaned further in. “Neither do I,” she said, voice dropping the way those young men had done in the halls of scholarship and in the hidden corners of extravagant parties. “You’re a braver man that I, Dorian Pavus.”

When Dorian laughed, he found he meant it, had found the humor in their unexpectedly similar predicaments. “Brave? Perish the thought. Handsome, charming, without a doubt.  Talented and powerful, absolutely. But I suspect you may be mistaking bravery for idiotic stubbornness, my friend.”

“We are friends, then.” Livia’s whole face warmed to it, and Dorian would certainly spend a long time kicking himself for not truly paying her attention before. She released his hand, then, and lightly struck him across one shoulder. “And as your friend, I’m telling you that you’re brave. I can’t say I’ve met anyone else who dared to be so open and unapologetic. The life you’d sacrifice…”

But the Iron Bull had spoken of that friend who deserted the army to live by his own terms, and two elves who kissed in the street and then bared staff and knives to anyone offering complaint. He’d spoken of his own sexual adventures with nothing but brazen enthusiasm. _Anyone who tells you different can get fucked_ , he’d said with a certainty that still had Dorian unsure.

“It’d be worth it,” Dorian said, slow and steady. He picked up another kumquat and dug his thumbnail in the skin to free its scent. “To give up the pretense. To love someone without – having to be their dirty secret, nor they yours. Who wouldn’t be afraid to love you back.”

Livia leaned back to study him, and Dorian held her gaze until her features unfocused and he cast his tired eyes elsewhere. The sky hung blue, the bold hue of a dry summer’s day, and in its depths the white moon hung like one of Livia’s lemon rinds, well on its way to half-waxed. There would be stars to watch tonight, should he have to look away from the Bull in a different context.

He thought, suddenly, of Rilienus and the notes left on his pillow. So daring, they had thought. Taking risks in the declaration of passion. Had they ever once even spoken of love? They rarely had spoken of anything meaningful, outside the bedrooms and gardens and, once, the balcony where they had fucked. The safety of Dorian’s academia, Rilienus’ studies in the way of the spirit healer, the toothless debate of politics.

They had never been unafraid.

“There _is_ someone,” Livia said, slowly, and Dorian wrenched his eyes back to meet hers. She studied him, contemplative rather than accusing. Dorian took a gulp of his wine. “You’re in love.”

“Ridiculous,” Dorian replied. “With whom? It’s not as if I have any other callers but you, and my father would never allow any man I’ve known within a day’s ride of me.” But he sounded defensive, too much so to convince anyone. And Livia was not just anyone.

He sighed. “I’ve been in love before. It… didn’t end well.”

“Does it ever?” Livia asked, squeezing his hand. “There’s no room for love in our hidden places. Too easily shone a light upon. No way to trust that it will be held close and respected.”

“No way to know when you’ll be discovered,” Dorian murmured.

“And yet you try anyway.” Livia smiled, a sad affair. “Bravery.”

Perhaps she was right. But Dorian’s heart hung heavy, and the sun stung at his eyes. “No matter, I suppose,” he said. “It all ends in pain, one way or another.”

He saw Livia off as the afternoon waned, Aquinea only stepping forward to kiss Livia’s cheek perfunctorily before striding away, heels clacking against the floor. Halward hung back, no doubt with something to say, but Dorian paid no mind until he’d stepped out to assist Livia into her carriage and then returned.

Halward approached as anticipated, footsteps echoing off the marble with nothing to dull the sound. Sighing, Dorian turned to meet him and the annoyance that no doubt accompanied. And yes, there it was, holding his father stiffly up, in the set of his jaw. The put-upon magister, weary of his selfish son’s disregard of filial duty, every inch the patriarch with the deep red of his silk housecoat fanning out behind him and at his sides. The lines of his face had already deepened before Dorian could do anything to goad him.

“You ought to know,” Halward said, voice clipped, “that your mother has an eye to setting Livia up for the magisterial seat rather than you. I did not know this was her intent when we finalized the negotiations, and I will admit, it concerns me. As you and Lady Herathinos seem to get on well, I expect that you will be able to intervene.” The sternness in his face affirmed the implication that he additionally expected Dorian to go through with it.

Dorian sighed. “She would make a good candidate.”

“She would be inappropriate for the position,” Halward replied, impatient. “We have been grooming you for the position your whole life, and you will best represent House Pavus’ interests. “You know what is expected of you. You _will_ do your duty to our name.”

Despite the best of effort, Dorian’s fingers flexed, and he pressed lower teeth up against upper. The Bull’s words surfaced again. It’s your life, he’d said, low and fierce, and now heat returned to Dorian’s left palm where their hands had stacked. “No,” he said, and his voice didn’t shake, didn’t even threaten it. “You wanted to marry me off to Livia Herathinos for a reason. Let her take the Magisterium seat. Surely you can see how suited she is to the task.”

Halward started, and covered with the narrowing of his eyes. “For all her credit, she is still no Pavus.”

“And I am no politician!”

There was a sense of gratification in the flash of anger across Halward’s face, though it vanished instantly behind his carefully cultivated calm. The marble faced man in his marble cut hall. A voice of reason against Dorian’s lack of control. “Do not think I am unaware of the quality of your application to it. I have seen you take on new fields of study at your whim and quickly excel within them – and stagnate on subjects for which you do not care. You are more than a match for the challenge of the Magisterium.”

Halward’s eyes narrowed when Dorian rolled his own. “Have you considered, Father, that perhaps I don’t _want_ to take on that particular challenge?”

Another slip in the façade: Halward took a step further into Dorian’s space. He had once been able to look down upon Dorian to reassert his authority, but even now that Dorian stood a fair five inches taller, the dynamic had been ingrained. Dorian had to steel himself in order to hold his ground.

“We have been more than patient with your tantrums,” Halward said. His hairline had steadily receded, leaving his forehead increasingly bare; Dorian studied this rather than allow himself to be menaced. “But it has been more than a year of childish self-pity. You have been allowed much, in your pursuit of scholarship, but ignored entirely self-discipline and duty. What you _want_ is inconsequential to what is required of you. The station which you have taken advantage of so readily comes with responsibility.”

_You don’t_ want _things. You are, or you’re not_.

Rebuttals crowded each other into his tightening throat, blocked by his fuming frustration, so Dorian just stood there mutely, sullen, unable to come to his own defense. He’d taken advantage of much. He’d raged at the rigidity of the Bull’s Qun, and yet here had always been proof that his ideals had only ever existed in his head.

He had nothing to say that would sway his father. Rather than play out another argument he would lose, Dorian turned on his heel and stalked away.

-

_The source of strife between father and son varies wildly from story to story. After Lastimus Alexius’ epic poem, the fashion became to depict the son as a blood mage(97), but prior to that, and with the advent of the long-form printed fictional narrative, other causes for the rift between them ranged from the son’s seduction by the North Wind(98) to simple political disagreements(99). Once again, the Aclassi interpretation deviates significantly from the norm, positing that the father’s unreasonable demands of the son put them at odds, as the son gradually lost his loyalty to House Pavus._

-

As the sun slowly disappeared behind the surrounding jungle, Dorian stalked his way up the stairs into his room. Self-discipline indeed. Had he not poured himself into his work despite his initial anger, his eventual despair and ensuing resignation? But clearly Halward only valued dedication when it pertained to his expectations for Dorian. All unrelated efforts meant little in the face of his father’s disappointment.

Only, when he looked to the spread of material he had worked so hard upon, he realized he hadn’t touched this, either, for a long time.

The research notes, the expanded outline, and the early drafts of Dorian’s treatise lay untouched on his desk. A fine layer of dust lifted into the air when he picked up a stained page of notes, the most recent, and yet over a week old. He’d asked about the mundane that night – cuisine, which led into a comparison of the respective flora and fauna of Par Vollen and Vyrantium. The Bull had mentioned the varying climates across the north of the Imperium. They’d devolved into anecdotes; the Bull too had climbed the volcano near Qarinus before its most recent explosion, but Dorian had never headed far enough west to reach the desert climes.

Dorian’s final question had never made the notes.

Gathered in the various notes he’d taken was a very extensive collection of relevant data, but the project itself had fallen by the wayside. Odd. For so long it had been his solid ground, the one thing he did on his own terms. But then, Dorian had other pursuits these days that he had built for himself. His friendship with Livia, an unanticipated comfort and support across his days. The ongoing, though often uncomfortable, task of unlearning his old assumptions about slavery. And there was the Bull.

That truth that had begun to coalesce in him had only clarified the more with Livia’s observations. Desire he knew and recognized, and the Bull had stoked that flame with what seemed more and more to be an open invitation. Dorian could have taken him up on that a long time ago.

But the Bull had offered him a casual affection as well. Reached out to touch him in support, in emphasis. Sat in silence with him just those few nights ago, and held Dorian’s hand. It wasn’t sexual. Dorian had thrummed with it all the same, and hadn’t once contemplated the Bull’s huge hand traveling anywhere else at all that night.

A passing fancy, perhaps, for their time together certainly was. Dorian twinged with the thought, and set down the page to look to the darkening sky. Too early to escape the manor without being seen, but he found himself too wrapped up in anger and anticipation to care. He had every right to take an evening walk, and if his parents saw they’d only assume his departure a fit of pique. Hang this secrecy. There lay no shame in what he planned to do.

He swept through the hall rather than take a side door, met the eyes of an elf with a mop as he passed by and nodded in acknowledgement, shoved the great doors open and let them slam behind him. A fierce sense of purpose had seized him. It fell around him like the cloak he’d forgotten as he strode across the lawns, fueled his restraint against the compulsion to break into a run until he’d passed through the portal between swaying trees.

Once there, he released himself into a scramble, shoving through the undergrowth without his staff to light the way. An overlooked tree root threw him to the ground hard enough to skin his knee and most likely leave an impressive bruise, but he only dusted himself off, lacking somehow his usual outrage at torn clothing. This path he knew well enough to follow through the memory of muscle alone, and the anticipation pulled him forward even as it consumed his focus.

The Bull looked up in surprise when Dorian burst into the clearing, and slowly stood with both brows raised. But Dorian had no intention of explaining himself in words. He crossed the space between them in three steps to grab the Bull by the horns to crash their lips together.

“You were right,” Dorian said, pulling away once more, and he could have laughed with the wildness that coursed through him. “I don’t owe them anything.”

Though he hadn’t kissed back, the Bull’s hands came up to grasp Dorian by the hips. “What brought this on?” he murmured. His breath blew hot against Dorian’s face. “Not that I’m complaining.”

Dorian laughed, and surprised himself with the brazen sound of it. Still holding the Bull’s horns, he twisted his hands around them, just to feel the texture he’d only imagined previously. “I told him no. None of this was ever for me, no matter how he spun it. I _refuse_ to go along with it anymore.”

Rubbing up and down Dorian’s hips, the Bull studied him, still not smiling – looking too serious. “And what did he say?”

This was taking too long. The anticipation had built in him for enough time already, and here Dorian had quite literally thrown himself at the Bull, who wasn’t even holding Dorian with any kind of intent. Asking Dorian _questions_ about his circumstances as if they pertained to the sex they ideally would already be having. “Of course he didn’t go along with it. But what can he really do?” Dorian scoffed. “Now are you going to make good on your invitation, or were you all talk after all?”

“One more question,” said the Bull. “Are you doing this to spite him, or do you actually want to have sex with me?”

Dorian jerked back, though not far enough to pull away from the Bull’s hands. “Is that what you think of me?” he demanded. The Bull continued to watch him, patient and studious, the shadows of his face dark and highlights bright with firelight. As if someone could know the Bull and _not_ want him. “I’m here because I want to be. I’ve spent enough time not chasing after what I want, and I want _you_.”

“Shit, Dorian,” the Bull said, and then, finally, hauled him back in.

To save both their necks from the strain, Dorian pulled himself by the Bull’s horns and held on with his legs wrapped around the Bull’s waist. The Bull supported him there with one hand on his ass, and tangled the other in the hair at the back of Dorian’s head. They had to break the kiss a few times to rearrange themselves, but the Bull’s hands never left Dorian’s body, and when apart he breathed heavy against Dorian’s throat.

“How do you want me?” Dorian said, low and huskier than he’d expected. But then again, pressed chest to chest against the Bull, connected head to toe, he had already begun to lose his head, arousal stirring beneath the adrenaline. “Oh, I’ve wondered what you’d do to me.”

The Bull smiled against Dorian’s jaw, where he’d been mouthing and dragging his teeth along the bone. “Sounds like you’ve already got some ideas.” His hand travelled around from where it had been stroking the space between Dorian’s shoulderblades to work lazily at the clasp of Dorian’s robes.

In the hurried trysts of his past, Dorian or his companion had always stated the direction and end goal at the start. No time for fumbling, most often, nor desire to have to stop and redirect. So there was no reason why Dorian should find himself tongue-tied now. “I,” he said, and then collected himself. “I thought that perhaps you would want me on my back with my legs around your waist, the better to pull me further onto your cock with every thrust. Or shove me up against a tree and take me like that. I could imagine you wanting me to suck you off, and then sitting or lying beside me so you could watch my face while you stroke me off. I can’t deny I’ve thought rather extensively about sucking your cock.” Dorian’s face would have flushed dark if it hadn’t already done so much earlier on. “It seems a worthy challenge. I suppose I’ve been assuming you would prefer to fuck me.”

It earned him the Bull’s slow appraising smile. “Would you prefer me to fuck you?” the Bull asked, just as languid. “I’m a little bigger than what you’re used to. Think you can take it?”

A jolt in Dorian’s groin; he’d thought about how big the Bull must be, considering his proportions, but it was rather another thing for the Bull to confirm it. “Oh, yes,” he breathed, and the Bull laughed, not mocking at all.

“That what you want?” The Bull drew Dorian’s robe free, and Dorian took it from him to fling it away. The collar of the shirt hung an inch and some below Dorian’s collarbone, and the Bull brushed two fingers over the hair revealed in that uncovered patch of skin. “You want me to give it to you rough? Should have known that’s how you’d like it.”

“I want you to surprise me.” Dorian pulled the Bull’s face up, until they met eye to eye, and rolled his hips. “I do enjoy being handled roughly, yes. But I’ve had my fantasies about this already – I want you to show me the real thing.”

The Bull ceased fiddling with Dorian’s shirt to untangle him and set him back down. His serious expression formed anew. “If you don’t want to know ahead of time, you’re gonna need a watchword.” The smile began to creep back to the Bull’s face when Dorian shivered, eyes widening all on their own, the corner of his mouth crooking. “Familiar with the concept, I take it.”

Now Dorian took his turn to smile, sure that the hunger showed obvious in his expression. “North,” he said, quirking the left corner of his mouth up. “My watchword is ‘North.’ And yours?”

The Bull had raised an eyebrow at Dorian’s word choice, but quickly his face resolved into – surprise? He nodded slowly. “I’m impressed.”

Abruptly the moment between them took on a certain weight. Even the Bull’s unspoken approval hit Dorian in the chest, and he scrambled for a joke to play it off. Collecting himself, he snorted. “If that’s your watchword, I’m insulted.”

“Most people don’t ask for mine.” But the unspoken _I didn’t expect you to be any different_ still rang clear, even if the Bull had obviously realized his mistake.

“I should hope you’ve caught on by now that I am hardly ‘most people’ at all,” Dorian sniffed. It worked to a degree; the Bull’s face relaxed again, though it lacked both the hunger and the smug anticipation that so recently had shown through. Dorian let his hands slide down to hang onto the Bull’s harness. “Now, if you’re quite done underestimating me…”

Finally, a smile, even though it took a hard twist. “Hissrad,” said the Bull. “I say that, you stop.”

It had to mean something, but Dorian wasn’t in the mood for exchanging questions just now. He pulled the Bull down by the harness to kiss again, teeth sharp against the Bull’s lower lip, and was rewarded by a low grunt punched from his mouth. The Bull returned his fingers to Dorian’s shirt, opening clasps not lazily at all. Finished, he slid it from Dorian’s shoulders, and Dorian allowed his hands to be pulled free of the Bull’s harness, though refusing the break the kiss.

The Bull laughed into Dorian’s mouth. The shirt he loosely folded and tossed over the wall with more care than Dorian might have shown in that moment. One hand trailed down Dorian’s breast, brushed so lightly against his nipple, and Dorian exhaled all in a rush.

Of all things, the Bull seemed fascinated by the reaction he’d elicited, as if… no, Dorian hadn’t a clue what motivated him. Better to unbuckle his harness and let him explore than try too hard to think about it. Best not to think too much of anything.

When Dorian reached for the Bull’s belt, though, the Bull caught his hands and pulled them away. A sharp inhale at the easy strength of it; he’d been manhandled and restrained before, but even when he’d wanted to struggle it had always involved a certain amount of holding back. It couldn’t be helped. Dorian stood at least half a head taller than his peers, thanks to his mother’s Thalrassian blood, and he maintained a certain level of fitness, because unyielding control of magic demanded unyielding control over every other aspect of body and mind.

But the Iron Bull held Dorian’s hands at chest level, steadily even when Dorian pulled back instinctively.

“This okay?” he asked, and at least his voice had gone husky, more proof that Dorian could affect him surely as he could affect Dorian. When the Bull didn’t get an immediate response he loosened his grip, and Dorian kicked him in the shin of his right leg. Somehow, when the Bull began to laugh, Dorian couldn’t quite keep the grin off his face.

He schooled his face into indignation, then, just to keep up appearances. “Certainly not!” Dorian snapped, with a well-heated glare to emphasize. “You’ve far more strength to you than that. I could easily break your grip – to be quite honest, I expected better of—”

The Bull put an end to the building rant by tackling Dorian to the ground. “Thought I would start small,” he growled, actually _growled_ , pressing Dorian’s arms out to the sides, straddling Dorian’s thighs, just inches away from grinding down against Dorian’s restrained cock. “Lot of people say they like it rough. I start small and escalate from there.”

“Nngh,” Dorian replied, eloquently. He tried again. “How far does this escalation take you?”

A pause, and then the Bull leaned forward to lower his mouth just next to Dorian’s ear. “I’m not gonna injure you. Beyond that, well, that’s the point of finding out.”

Completely without his permission – and here’s another area he ought to improve his control – Dorian arched his back and shivered again, while the Bull huffed a laugh into Dorian’s ear. A brief, sharp bite, and he pushed himself up again.

“You want to follow orders?” he asked, and canted his hips forward _almost_ enough for contact. “Or did you come here looking for a fight?” Dorian swallowed a whine. It would have been misleading at best, embarrassing at worst – except the Bull was watching, humming softly. He must have noticed anyway.

Dorian raised an eyebrow, just barely opened his mouth, looked up at the Bull through his lashes; a demonstration. “Oh, I hardly intend to simply lie down and take it.”

“Oh, fuck,” said the Bull, and came crashing down to take Dorian’s mouth, holding Dorian in place now with his considerable bulk. He released Dorian’s wrists and placed a hand, firm but without pressure, on Dorian’s throat.

There was nothing for it then but to groan with the jolt of adrenaline it caused. The Bull made some sort of satisfied noise and pulsed the hand once, twice. Dorian surrendered to the feeling and writhed beneath him as best he could. But he also bit the Bull’s lip, hard enough to hitch the Bull’s breath, and smiled sharply into it.

“I have a notion that I could make you come like this,” he said, as casually as he could manage against the Bull’s mouth, beneath the Bull’s weight and the Bull’s hand. “You haven’t let me touch you, but I can feel how hard you are through your appalling trousers.”

A momentary success, if the Bull’s own moan said anything. But then he pulled his face back, and Dorian opened his eyes – when had he closed them? – to the Bull assessing him. The Bull shook his head. “You’re still talking in sentences. I’m not doing my job right.”

He made to lean back down to continue the kiss, but Dorian grabbed hold of his horns and _yanked_. Clearly the Bull allowed it, for Dorian truly wouldn’t have been capable of shifting him if he’d meant to stay put, but it was still satisfying to see the surprise on his face when Dorian flipped them and straddled the Bull in the reverse of their previous position. But Dorian had been pinned down. The Bull, unencumbered, sat up to grip him around the waist, so to hold Dorian in place in his lap.

“Oh, but you’re desperate for it,” the Bull said, not smirking but with an air of wonder. “You’ve been driving yourself crazy over this for days. I could tear the rest of your clothes off you and you’d just beg me to fuck you right here, wouldn’t you?”

Dorian twisted in his hold, exaggerating the movement to grind down against the Bull’s very prominent erection beneath two pairs of trousers. “Not a chance.”

“Thought you wanted to know what I want to do to you,” the Bull replied, now moving Dorian against the roll of his hip until Dorian gasped, and then beyond. “Maybe I want a show. Pull you up and down on my dick until I come, then stay inside you while I tease you until you’re begging and screaming for it. That’d be something to put in your treatise, wouldn’t it?”

By now Dorian couldn’t tell the difference between struggling to free himself and struggling to get more friction against his cock. At this point, it didn’t seem to matter. He snapped his hips forward, and in the Bull’s bitten-off cry that could mean pain _or_ pleasure, Dorian chose the first intention and took the opportunity to wrench out of the Bull’s hands and stumble backwards.

The Bull laughed, loud and delighted, and Dorian smirked back. “You’ll have to work for it,” he said, to a sudden gleam in the Bull’s eye. Dorian got to his feet just an instant before the Bull did but barely sidestepped the Bull’s lunge in time. He dodged again, but something hit the back of his legs and upset his balance. Before Dorian could right himself, the Bull was upon him, hands closing around Dorian’s bare shoulders.

“You want to keep your pants in one piece,” the Bull murmured, “turn around and don’t move. Any resistance, I rip them right off.”

A shaky inhale, a ragged exhale, and Dorian complied. When the danger to his clothes abated, he could stop being so biddable – but of all the acts the Bull had threatened, only this one brought the watchword forward to rest against his tongue in case he needed it. But the Bull had given him an acceptable out. Truth be told, the coarse texture to the Bull’s hands as they guided Dorian around sent a thrill down his spine. It was one thing to offer oneself, and quite another to be taken.

And all the while, the Bull kept up a litany of encouragement. “That’s it,” he crooned when Dorian first began to turn, and “Very good,” when Dorian settled against him, facing the low wall – fitting, that it had tripped him up. “I like you like this, too,” he said against Dorian’s neck, “so pliant,” before sinking his teeth into Dorian’s shoulder and sucking out a bruise. When Dorian moaned, helplessly: “Mm, yeah, let me hear you.”

The Bull’s hands slid up Dorian’s chest, dragging nail against nipple to the tune of Dorian’s choking gasps and the low noises that slipped from his mouth. Then the Bull dragged his hands back down to the laces of Dorian’s trousers. “See?” he said. “There’s rewards for obedience.”

There were indeed, the precise movements of the Bull’s fingers against him serving a fine example. Dorian did his best to catch his breath. “I’ll – _ah_ – enjoy them while they last.”

He got no response but the Bull’s soft laughter, and then the unexpected sharp pain of another bite, this one high on his neck. Dorian cried out, voice higher in pitch than before. And then once more, as the Bull shoved one hand beneath his trousers to finally, _finally_ take hold of Dorian’s cock.

“That’s right, Dorian, I’ve got you,” the Bull murmured into his ear, other hand tugging Dorian’s loosened trousers down to spill around his ankles. “You gonna let me give it to you now?”

It took a moment for Dorian’s words to coalesce; rather, he made use of the opportunity to survey the stars he’d anticipated seeing earlier, with the Bull warm at his back and gentle with the hand around his cock. And it would be so easy to relent. Bull could pull Dorian down to sit in his lap again, free his own cock, slowly push upward until he could pull Dorian no further down. It would be easy for Dorian to fall apart and ride him out. Dorian could do it. He’d thought about it enough.

It would be easy, perhaps, but not nearly as fun.

“Now why would I let you do that?” Dorian said, languid and low, just before taking the Bull’s hand by two pressure points to immobilize it and pull free from his grip. Pinch, turn, step, throw; the movement had been drilled into him at a young age. Any tool on hand to avoid assassination. Of course, the Bull’s hands were too wide and thick-skinned for Dorian to properly take him down, but when he stumbled, it didn’t feel affected.

He caught the momentum of Dorian’s throw and spun around, and the firelight in high contrast on his skin distracted Dorian an instant too long. Dorian had barely registered the mingled fear and stabbing arousal that shot through him before the Bull grabbed him by the hair and yanked him to the side, just across the line from too painful. The combination of all three sensations had him shouting even before the Bull twisted Dorian’s arm behind his back.

“Word?” the Bull asked, dipping to skim his teeth across the back of Dorian’s neck.

“More,” Dorian spat.

For a moment they paused, catching their breath, while Dorian’s cock throbbed with need. This time the Bull didn’t give him the relief of touch, only pulling Dorian back against him once more, by the hair. “I’ll ask you again.” He twisted Dorian’s arm tighter just long enough to drag out another moan. “Will you let me give it to you? You know I’ll take care of you.” A roll of Dorian’s hips set the Bull to swearing. He dragged Dorian closer in. “Or would you rather I just take what I want from you?”

“I have no intention of simply rolling over for you,” Dorian replied, arch tone, rolling his hips again just to feel the shape of the Bull’s cock behind him. It twitched as he continued, “You’ll have to make me.”

The growl returned to the Bull’s voice as he released his hold on Dorian’s hair. “Good thing I’m not planning on you rolling anywhere.”

With his free left hand, the Bull reached between them, and – _oh_ – pulled his belt open, shoved his own trousers down, so Dorian could feel the true heat and heft of him against his ass. He ground back against it to the Bull’s groan, but then he was pushed down roughly over the wall, bent at the hips, the Bull solid behind him.

“You’ll want to hold on there,” the Bull said. “I’m not planning on – oh, shit.”

The threat had vanished from his voice, replaced by chagrin. He released Dorian’s other arm, and pulled away while Dorian stretched out his shoulder. “Sorry, Dorian,” the Bull said, chuckling a bit. “Left the oil in my pack.”

Dorian turned around and found himself laughing as well at the Bull, hard as a rock, trying to walk with his trousers bunched around his boots and the ankle brace. He’d meant to be cross, of course. But the ridiculous display seemed a fitting price for the Bull having to stop just when it was getting good.

Still. Things _had_ been getting good.

“Bull,” Dorian called, and when he didn’t get a response, raised his voice. “Bull!”

“Right there!”

Dorian rolled his eyes. “I’m a mage, you lug! There’s a spell for that!”

There was a brief pause for the Bull to freeze in place, and then he turned around, sheepish, and stepped carefully back to where Dorian sat on the wall. “I guess I was just a bit distracted.” His hand, when it reached Dorian’s hair, roamed rather than grasping.

Smugness took Dorian and curled his lips. He stood and reached up to hold onto the Bull’s shoulders, to pull the two of them flush, and smiled wider as he felt the Bull perk up again between them. “Very understandable,” he said rocking forward and then away. “I am incredibly distracting.”

The Bull wrapped his arm around Dorian’s waist, trapping him there. “Hmm.” His hand slipped lower, just barely down the dip between Dorian’s cheeks. Just enough to have Dorian arch his back against the Bull’s touch. “I think I should do something about that.”

Once again it would’ve been nice, in another context, to stay pressed together like this. Dorian had brought past lovers off that way, frotting until they came on each other and themselves. Something to kill the loneliness. The heat of his cock against the Bull’s made a convincing argument. But Dorian hadn’t run here tonight to cling together, nothing so soft as that.

So he loosened his grip on the Bull’s shoulders to drag his nails down the Bull’s chest, increasing his force until the Bull sharply inhaled. “I seem to recall you making a very promising attempt before that little adventure. Have you changed your mind about roughing me up, or are you still too _distracted_ to resume?”

Finally the Bull’s lips stretched into a smirk, his hand in Dorian’s hair twisting enough to hurt. He hummed, trailed the fingers on Dorian’s ass a little lower, enough to summon a shiver, and then pulls Dorian back by the hair to align their mouths. “Have _you_ changed your mind about being a good boy and letting me give it to you?”

“Unfortunately for you,” said Dorian, landing somewhere between airily and simply breathy, “I am neither good nor a boy these days. You’ll simply have to _make_ me.”

“I’m not seeing the down side here,” the Bull replied, and then pulled Dorian that half-inch in to kiss. All tongue and teeth he pulled apart Dorian’s lips. With no quarter to move Dorian couldn’t retaliate, and so he abandoned that frontier to roll his hips between the Bull’s questing fingers and hardened cock. Dorian moaned against the Bull’s skin, the Bull into Dorian’s open mouth.

Then abruptly the Bull let him go. Not for long; Dorian had barely caught his breath before the Bull was yanking him around to shove him down once more to the old wall. A shout punched itself free of his throat even before the Bull pressed against him, heated cock pushing at Dorian’s balls.

He took his whole hand from Dorian’s hip to trail from the small of the back to his shoulder, then up the side of Dorian’s throat to touch, finally, his lower lip, pushing until Dorian opened his mouth again to let them in. Lazily the Bull thrust his fingers in and out, and Dorian took the cue to suck at them, to use his tongue.

“Slick my fingers like that,” the Bull said, and then snorted when Dorian bit down instead. “Or don’t. Won’t hurt _me_ if I go in dry.”

Dorian growled, the effect ruined by his full mouth, but he summoned that thick, slippery substance to his tongue to coat the Bull’s fingers as ordered. The Bull hummed his approval and withdrew the hand. Unwilling to surrender just yet, Dorian wrest himself free of the other hand’s grip to the Bull’s deep chuckle, only to freeze when the Bull brought his dry hand hard and flat against Dorian’s ass.

A valiant attempt to keep silent utterly failed, and Dorian gasped and moaned, muffled no longer. Another hum, and then with no further warning the Bull pushed a finger into him down past the first knuckle. Dorian clenched helplessly around it, but the Bull didn’t relent, making small circles that grew in diameter with each time Dorian felt himself relax. There was no time to catch his breath; once he’d been stretched just barely enough, the Bull added a second finger, and Dorian cried out.

“Yeah, that’s right.” The Bull switched his movement, fucking into Dorian with both fingers, deeper now. When he pulled his fingers back he curled them to hit that one particular gland, and Dorian’s whole body jerked in the abrupt jolt of pleasure that lanced through him. The Bull rumbled another laugh. “Oh, you’re gonna be so tight. Really has been a while for you, hasn’t it?”

“Why don’t you test that theory some more,” Dorian bit out, pushing back against the Bull’s fingers. His reward: the Bull shoved a third finger in. This time he didn’t pull all the way back but pulsed his fingers, picking up speed until Dorian gave up and let forth all the low noises and gasps he’d been trying to restrain.

It had good effect, at least. “Shit, Dorian,” the Bull said, voice husked, shifting the fingers inside him and lengthening the strokes in and back. Without interruption, the Bull tightened his hold on Dorian’s hip and ground his cock further forward. “You’re gonna want to slick me up before I fuck you proper.”

Dorian didn’t bother to put up a fight, not with the exquisite frustration of the Bull’s fingers inside him. He took a hand from the wall and dropped his shoulder to reach between his legs for the Bull’s cock. Even the barest brush against his own had him exhaling hard, and finally taking the Bull in hand followed it with a low moan. Oh, but it was thick and heavy, and the Bull was about to _fuck him with it_ , and if Dorian had ever been this aroused in his life he couldn’t remember now.

Once he’d coated it, the Bull pulled his fingers free – and then paused for a beat. “Shit,” he repeated, and Dorian broke character to snicker.

“I should hope not,” he replied, and turned as much as he could to catch the Bull’s impressed look. “I’ll have you know I mastered that spell half my life ago. Rather incriminating to be found with that sort of filth on one’s hands, and unhygienic besides.”

The Bull watched him hungrily for a moment more. “Now I’m _definitely_ eating you out afterward.”

Before Dorian could embarrass himself with his own eagerness, the Bull tightened his grip around Dorian’s hips – no doubt to leave bruises later – and pushed in. The girth of him felt all the more vast within Dorian than without, and this time Dorian couldn’t have held his ragged whine in if he’d tried. He dropped his head again and braced himself against the wall. The Bull pulled back slightly to thrust ever deeper, nearly too much every time, cursing and groaning as Dorian clenched around him and then forced himself to relax.

Finally the Bull pressed once more forward, and somehow Dorian had taken all of him, because his pelvis rested firm against Dorian’s ass. “Oh, _fuck_ ,” Dorian groaned, to the hitch of the Bull’s breath. “Bull—”

“Hope you’re ready.” The Bull paused all the same, another invitation for use of the watchword, but Dorian only ground back, relished the momentary extra stretch. “You think you’re full now…”

“Will you get on with it!” Dorian snapped. “So help me, Bull—”

This apparently did the trick; the Bull pulled away, almost out, before thrusting all the way back in, and Dorian cut himself off with a rough cry and a curse of his own. “Again,” he said, and the Bull pulled back again, but this time to yank Dorian against him as he pushed forward.

The Bull paused there, stroking Dorian’s flank and rocking against him, still fully seated. “You good?” He waited until Dorian nodded, then drew his still-slicked hand up to Dorian breast to pinch at the nipple before returning and adjusting his grip. “Good. Because those threats I made earlier, well. They weren’t just filler.”

A blink, and then Dorian groaned for entirely different reasons – at least until the Bull pulled back and slammed into him.

Oh, it hurt, but the kind of hurt that had Dorian’s cock aching, his breath catching, his nerves electric within him. He had no purchase but to hold himself up and allow the Bull to move him, and occasion clench himself around the Bull for a groan or a shout, the next thrust always the harder for it. The Bull’s dry left hand let go to grab Dorian by the hair and pull his head up. He hummed at Dorian’s broken cry.

They were both soaked in sweat and hoarse of voice, the Bull’s thrusts no less hard but now erratic, when the Bull leaned over Dorian’s back to murmur in his ear. “I’m close,” he said, “so if you want to come, you better start begging.”

“You underestimate – _aah_ – your own prowess, if you think – oh, _fuck_ – you can’t get me off without touching my cock.”

A breathy laugh, vibrating between them. “I’m touched,” replied the Bull. “You won’t be.”

There lay a challenge there. Dorian smirked, though the Bull wouldn’t see. “I think you’re the one who wants to touch _me_.” To punctuate, he rolled his hips when next the Bull shoved fully inside him, and as expected the Bull groaned louder than usual, digging fingers even harder into the crease between leg and torso. “You planning to take what you want?”

The Bull picked up the pace again, burying his teeth in the skin below Dorian’s shoulderblade with a frustrated growl. But he took the bait. Dorian _yelled_ as the Bull’s hand closed around his cock, and _whimpered_ as the Bull matched his pace to their frantic, fragmented rhythm. “Come _on_ , Dorian, come for me.” His name fell so sweetly from the Bull’s lips. “I want to feel you fall apart around me.”

“ _Make me_.”

Dorian couldn’t help the wild laughter that consumed him, pressed down over the ruined wall, helpless to what the Bull would take of him, each hard thrust shuddering through him. He laughed as the Bull pounded into him, as desperate as Dorian was, and he kept laughing through the tense and his shuddering release.

Groaning, the Bull slowed his thrusts to push deeper instead, supporting Dorian with an arm around his chest. They moved together through Dorian’s aftershocks, and then rode out the Bull’s orgasm much in the same manner. The Bull sat back and pulled Dorian with him, remaining within. He stroked Dorian’s hair.

They would have to separate in a minute, but for now Dorian luxuriated in the unusual opportunity to simply be held, with no motives but the obvious.

Later, a second round, in which Dorian attempted to suck the Bull’s cock – well, did suck the Bull’s cock, but not nearly as much of it as he’d hoped to. But the Bull praised him throughout, and came encouragingly in his mouth, and then swallowed him down and bade Dorian to fuck his face. Afterward they lay down over discarded robe and frankly offensive striped trousers and just kissed for a while, and then the Bull gathered Dorian in against his side and just held him, and no one had intended to fall asleep but neither particularly wanted to move…

Dorian woke to something solid – well, several things, sharp rocks no doubt – digging into his side, and a warm weight across his back and shoulder. An arm, most likely, which also supported his head, and pressed him against the Bull’s side. When Dorian opened his eyes and looked up, the Bull was smiling down at him.

“You drifted off mid-sentence,” he said, teasing but fond. Dorian lifted his arm not trapped between them, intending a shove but managing instead a drowsy pat on the Bull’s ludicrous breast.

“The blame lies entirely with you,” Dorian replied, and shoved his nose into the flesh beneath the Bull’s armpit. Not beneath enough, though; he wrinkled his nose. “Ugh. You reek.”

The Bull had the gall to laugh. It was, to be fair, sort of funny. “Now that, I’d say, was all you.”

When Dorian lifted his head to seek the last word, the Bull only bent to kiss him, slow and messy. As concession, he extracted his right arm to grip the Bull’s face with both hands and opened his mouth as if a door for a guest. A familiar or at least overly friendly guest, who proceeded to make himself at home without encouragement.

In this case, Dorian saw fit to allow the impropriety.

He traveled toward coherence in a meandering but steady climb, content to lie there and be held, to explore the texture of the Bull’s face, only ever studied before, with lips and fingertips. The Bull kissed him once on the neck to a faint bloom of pain. A souvenir, then – Dorian would have to cover it over with cosmetics, but that seemed a fair exchange.

The thought jarred him. He’d not registered the quality of the light, far nearer dawn than he’d stayed before. The sense of abandon had left him behind, lost or just fucked out of him, leaving Dorian with the knowledge that the household would arise soon, and much as he loathed it, the Bull had to remain a close-kept secret.

“Bull,” he said, unhappily, and the Bull withdrew his mouth to hear Dorian out. “I have to…”

“Yeah,” said the Bull, “I know.”

It took all of Dorian’s willpower to drag himself away.

Sunlight hadn’t broken over the jungle horizon yet as Dorian slunk back across the lawn. His bruised knee, forgotten until now, had begun to complain, and he allowed himself a limp. The cloth beneath the leather would need cleaning and repair at least, if not outright replacement, to be salvaged. It could sit at the bottom of his clothing chest, once rinsed and dried. He had other clothes.

He’d nearly reached the tradesmen’s entrance when he heard the footfall; a sense of dread had already massed before he turned around and failed to be surprised to see his father’s outright fury.

“So you would throw away all we have done for you. What reputation we agreed to repair.” Halward’s voice didn’t rise, but there was heat behind it instead of ice. He held tensed arms at his sides, had pulled himself up to his full height, disgust clear in his features. “All of this, to debase yourself with some Soporati, no doubt. How long has this gone on?”

One night, Dorian thought, numb, and stared at a point past his father’s ear. The orchards, trees laden with heavy fruit despite the current harvest drawing to a close. In the early days of his captivity he’d fled there to get as lost as he could, at least enough for plausible deniability. Somewhere along the way, Dorian had lost that priority.

Halward _hmphed_. “No matter, I suppose. It ends now. Since I clearly cannot trust you to comport yourself correctly, I will enforce it. You are no longer to leave the house unaccompanied. A watch will be placed to see that you do not.”

Once again, Dorian did not reply. To the edge of the orchard, the hedge gardens and the pagoda rising above from the center. Beyond his line of sight, with the corner of the manor blocking it – marble, of course, everything marble, appearances must be maintained. The hedges carefully clipped into perfect, clean angles. The roses all hidden, pruned to match height. Only Dorian’s discord marred the image of the perfect magister’s perfect household.

“Have you nothing at all to say for yourself?” Halward demanded.

Dorian did not. There was no defense, not when his inherent being so repulsed his father. Not when the pride his father had once held in him had only been earned when Dorian fell into line with his overarching plan. Not a child at all, only an heir. A marble wall that Dorian had thrown his love against as if it might stick.

His father’s love had never been for him.

“If you’re quite finished,” Dorian said, and only began to shake once he’d closed the door behind him.


	3. The Wild Hunt

_Here the legends divide. The most popular tale(36) – certainly the least controversial – has the North Wind finally consume him, hand slipping from his father’s grasp. Another version(37) shows the son to have been a traitor all along, bleeding his father to slay his mother, his bride-to-be, and any other unfortunate souls within the reach of the Pavus lands. Mad with power, he vanishes into the jungle, only a violent flash of light to indicate to the dying magister his son has met his own end. Both tellings have been represented often, both in prose and verse, and in the case of the latter, opera(38)._

_A more sympathetic retelling gained traction among the soporati some time ago, though documentation is notably sparse(39). Often overlooked by scholars, it nevertheless remains essential to a complete and accurate study of the legend. In this particular narrative, the son becomes the protagonist, and is given a more fully-fleshed persona. Some irony exists in the humanizing of the dramatis personae, while the retellings favored by altus and magister mostly feature caricatures of Tevene archetypes(40)._

_The version collected by the late soporati author Amelior Aclassi(41) in her_ A Compilation of Workmen’s Legends _, and verified(42) through a series of interviews,  gives the son the name Dorian. He is depicted as a scholar, and implied to be an invert – and most significantly, departs his home unwillingly in the culmination of the conflict with his father. Fearing Dorian to be driven mad or cursed by his incessant study of the North Wind fable, with a nod to his potential preferences, the elder Pavus turns desperate measures to save his son, bringing about the destruction of House Pavus with his own actions. The Aclassi retelling also merits additional significance for being the only version of the legend that continues the story after the son flees his father._

-

The morning passed into afternoon occupied only by Dorian’s pacing. By the time he thought to eat, breakfast had long passed, but the thought of disrupting the kitchens again sat ill with him. He could hold off till lunch, and in his hunger manage to avoid witnessing his parents’ judgement. So he bathed, and then paced up and down the library, punctuated only by sudden flashbacks to the previous night whenever he raised his arms just so. The Bull’s scent still clung to him. Sometimes he had to lean against the wall, waiting out the weakening of his knees or the tightness in his groin.

Lunch was not a particularly successful affair. He stepped into the dining room only to be brought up short by the accusing eyes of both his parents – Halward angry and scowling, Aquinea disdainful and curling her upper lip. Only the briefest consideration took Dorian before changing his plan, walking to the table only to pluck a few stuffed dates from their bowl and spoon chilled aubergine slices onto a plate. It might be running away, but Dorian had no intention to weather his parents’ deep disapproval. Without so much more as a glance their way, he left the way he’d entered.

He took his lunch to one of the galleries, this one lined with antiquities, and sat on the pedestal of the rough-carved and eroded griffon statue that served as a centerpiece. When he’d finished the meal he stood again to wander the room, soles of his shoes clacking against the floor, the sound echoing off the marble. There, a mask worn by the priests of Urthemiel two hundred and twenty years ago, kept in a glyph of protection to preserve the painted vellum and untarnished copper beads that dangled from it. Further down, the Pavus crest, peacock carved from lazurite, detailed with veridium and delicate lines of gold. Outdated equipment to measure spell strength. Ceremonial dress belonging to Pavuses long dead.

Archived here lay the history of centuries. Dorian would have been happy to spend his life studying this collection, or others like it. What point was there to directing the future without an understanding of the past? And what a waste to let such knowledge lie about, untouched? He had spent long hours examining the contents of this gallery once, cross-referencing with books of history and magic and religion, connecting the artifacts within to their contexts. His father had praised him then, for his scholarship and his discipline.

Through the past year and change of his confinement, Dorian had returned here with purpose. He found more material in the library, but occasionally tangential ideas connected to some object or another. Eventually, though, the small well of relevant information had dried up, and he’d sought other avenues.

His attention had wandered, but a glimpse of bright red brought him up short. A large pauldron, associated only with a very vaguely documented series of battles that hadn’t managed to reach the scale of a full-on war. The geometric patterns had fascinated him in his teenage years, unfamiliar to any era’s aesthetic as far as he could tell. Eventually he had dismissed the enigma to the back of his mind, a project to return to in the event of a lull in his work. He hadn’t thought of it in years. But now, regarding it again, he found he’d seen this patterning before. The Bull wore something very similar over his shoulder brace.

Another connection. Dorian made a note to find the logbook that listed where and when each piece on display had been acquired, track down the source. If the Imperial forces had clashed with the Qunari before, the incident clearly had been removed from the record. Without verifiable evidence Dorian couldn’t make any claims too wild, but considering the ongoing mystery of who had built those ancient roads, and the obvious significance of the beacon, a certain conclusion came to mind. The northeast lands of the Imperium had perhaps not always been Tevinter at all.

He’d have to ask the Bull about it.

If he even had the chance to see the Bull again. While theoretically his “illness” would postpone the day of his wedding – odd though, that Dorian still didn’t know the date – the Bull had a deadline of his own. No windstorm had swept in during the night yet, but Dorian had neglected to ask if such a herald existed. Would the Bull have left, or did he remain at his beacon? Another question Dorian hadn’t asked.

Once returned to his rooms, he skimmed through his notes for forgotten pieces of information, anything that hadn’t seemed significant when he’d recorded it but might have become relevant with context since learned. It was the gaps in information that caught Dorian the most, though. Here, the relevance of Tal-Vashoth to the hunt itself, but nothing about the madness of the Tal-Vashoth. Mindless killers, lacking in purpose, Dorian recalled, but the good-spirited, easygoing nature of the Bull couldn’t have come about only under the tenets of the Qun. But perhaps that was why he’d never expressed any doubt, no particular desire to leave. Dorian had been the one adrift and empty of purpose. The Bull had never seemed anything but entirely sure of himself.

The notes from Dorian’s previous research then, and his continued forays into historical texts, folk legends, archaeological records. Anecdotes he’d dismissed prior to meeting the Bull. Destruction attributed to the passage of the North Wind. So many theories proved utterly incorrect; he’d have to track down the sources and work out how to disprove them without direct use of his interviews with the Bull. So many existing pieces of information to examine for use in proving what he already knew.

Something clenched under his ribcage. Best case scenario, after a few more nights these notes would be all he had left of the Bull. Worst case, they already were.

This wasn’t helping. Dorian returned the notes to his desk and then stared into the middle distance until he could wrestle the tightness in his lungs under control. Still shaken, he picked up his outline, summoned an orb of light against the fading afternoon light through his north- and east-facing windows, and settled back in his chair to read through.

Hours slipped by as he struggled through his own writing, frustration mounting, unable to focus with his thoughts ever returning to the Bull. There was nothing for it. After catching himself reading the same useless paragraph five times in a row, Dorian stood all in a rush and slapped the unsalvageable outline down on the pages of notes, releasing a cloud of dust. He coughed, swung his foot back to kick the desk, then hopped around the room cursing from the pain. Preferable to setting his work and possibly his whole room on fire. Well, probably.

Night had fallen while Dorian wasn’t paying attention. If he were to look out the window now, he’d see the beacon’s mist trail, the diffused blue glow. Did it guide anyone tonight?

His stomach growled. What time had passed, Dorian couldn’t guess, but lunch had been light and by design he had avoided family dinner. He’d not wanted to intrude upon the kitchens again. As a boy the slaves had always made him feel welcome there when he showed up in the pantry, but what else could they have done? Maybe it had been easier to give pastries to a child, even as chatty and demanding a brat he had always been.

The downstairs was dark. No way to tell if Halward waited up to stop him from leaving, but even if he were, what could he do? Only command. Nothing of weight anymore. First, something to eat, and then Dorian would just walk out the door, and back to the Bull, who didn’t care about whatever manner of depravity Dorian felt inclined toward beyond wanting to take part.

By the dim light and relative quiet of the kitchens, the hour must have grown later than previously anticipated. Within, only five individuals: one tall brown elf scoured the stovetop, a boy – who might have been her son and couldn’t have been older than ten – mopped the floor, a weathered and hunching old fellow dressing a pair of fish steaks palest pink and vivid magenta, and a young woman stood beside him, tracking the procedure with sharp-looking eyes. The fifth leaned behind a spice rack, unidentifiable until she emerged some seconds later. Dorian wasn’t sure if he was fortunate or uncomfortable to find himself face-to-face with Claudia again. It felt so long ago that he had rattled her in a much busier kitchen, when it had only been – _vishante kaffas,_ yesterday, when he’d entertained Livia in the garden and she had confided in him the reason they would suit one another so well in marriage. When she’d accused Dorian of falling in love.

“Master Dorian,” Claudia said, somewhere between honest wariness and false welcome. Suddenly he had the attention of the room. Dorian had spoken before crowds of hundreds, where his studies or his career had hung on the line, and none of that compared to the scrutiny of five slaves across a kitchen from him.

He smiled over it, a winning smile, a flash of perfect teeth kept perfectly clean. “Please,” he told her, and the room at large, “there’s no need to call me that.”

A resounding silence met his words. After a long pause, Claudia set down her rag on the butcher’s block. “ _Master_ Dorian.”

Dorian’s mouth twitched. Claudia most likely wouldn’t find the humor in the situation, and he didn’t particularly want to familiarize his foot with his mouth more than he has, especially to Claudia’s disapproving eyebrows. He was clearly being assessed as is, and for once by someone with good reason to find him wanting. Claudia asked, carefully, “Did you need something?”

Taking a deep breath, Dorian toned down his smile, extended his hands palms-out, placating. Backing out after overstepping. “I seem to have lost track of time in my research, and missed the evening meal completely. I had hoped there might yet be remainders.” His stomach took the opportunity to growl, loudly. The elven woman at the stove released a huff of breath that probably had originally been a laugh.

On the other hand, Claudia seemed to have frozen behind her disdain. Her eyes darted toward the old man, and then back to Dorian. So much for his attempts at respectful conduct. He freed Claudia from his attention to turn to the man who must have been a cook, who met Dorian’s gaze only briefly. “Surely the young master would appreciate something fresh,” he said, looking back Claudia’s way. “You could ask what he would prefer to eat.”

It occurred to Dorian that working in the kitchens as she did, Claudia probably had very little experience interacting with the household. Dorian, the intruder, had bypassed anyone presiding over her who might serve as an intermediary; of course she would feel out of her depth. This in mind, he turned once again Claudia’s way and smiled again as gently as he knew how.

By the tension still in her shoulders, he’d missed the mark entirely.

They stumbled through the decision making process, Dorian finding his mind blank when presented with the question of _what would you like to eat_ , Claudia speaking slowly, either to counter her own stress or Dorian’s. Interaction finally concluded, she approached the old cook, who handed her a key, and she walked rather quickly away to return with the relevant ingredients.

Couscous had been the first thing Dorian could think of that would take as little time as possible, steaming away as the old cook added thin strips of lamb and a few pinches of various spices to a quickly chopped heap of vegetables. No more than a quarter an hour passed before the cook spooned the panful into a bowl and handed it with a spoon to Dorian.

He ate, awkwardly, as the cook’s assistant washed the pan and chopping board, and everyone else returned to their former tasks. Silence claimed the kitchen as he ate, leaning against the butcher’s block, trying not to stare at anyone, never quite losing himself deep enough into his own thoughts.

“You don’t act like you’re supposed to.”

The young boy had ceased mopping again in favor of watching Dorian with guileless curiosity. A kindred soul, perhaps. But here at this late hour, learning to scrub floors and properly interact with the family who deigned to confine him. Dorian had been in the midst of a rigorous education and waited on hand and foot for no good reason at all. He hadn’t even had the gall to feel lucky.

And another difference: where Dorian had been commended for speaking up, now the boy’s mother hushed him with a flick to his ear. Before she could apologise, Dorian let himself laugh. He even managed to remove the bitterness from it. “I’m told so quite frequently, yes.”

A snort from behind him – Claudia, who seemed more at ease now she’d returned to dusting shelves. The elder elven woman shot her a warning look – the five of them had something of a family dynamic to them. Like the Alexius household, enough to bring a pang with the thought.

“I suppose,” Dorian said, into the silence that had fallen, “that since I’m apparently an utter failure of a magister’s son, I may as well go all the way and drop the superiority act while I’m at it.”

There was no response, but that was only to be expected. Dorian swallowed the last of his couscous, the empty bowl snatched away from him before he could fuss over it. No cause to disrupt them further; he turned and left.

Beyond the faint noises from the kitchen, the house stood silent. From the sealed training hall Dorian selected an unadorned staff for the event of a confrontation, and then stole through the portrait gallery and down the long hall that culminated in the other side door. It sat unwell with him to sneak out as if ashamed, but avoiding further conflict would at least prevent Halward’s ire from worsening. It would be nice if someday in the not-too-distant future Dorian could leave the property without risk of being dragged back once again.

He made it as far as opening the door and stepping through before colliding with a barrier.

A thorough inspection and testing of the barrier yielded no results, not even when he lost his temper and slammed it with raw force. Eventually he sagged, slid down the invisible solidity of it to rest elbows on knees, head in hands.

“Did you not expect me to take precautions?” Halward asked unprompted the next morning. “Clearly your – _trysts_ have addled you further than we had expected.”

Dorian fought and conquered the urge to unleash the same slam of power upon his father as he had the barrier. For his success he allowed himself to stalk past Halward favouring the immature silent treatment rather than holding his ground.

The second day passed much in the same way as the first, save for timing his jaunt into the kitchens to fall between the clearing up from lunch and the full bustle of dinner preparations. If Claudia were there, Dorian couldn’t see her, but the tall, stern woman from last night _was_ , and caught his eye from where she stood, returning dried pots and pans to where they were kept on a long metal rack. “If possible,” Dorian said, when she approached, “I would prefer to take my meals in solitude for now.”

“It will be as you command,” she said, with a slight bow. Dorian winced. “Where shall I have it sent?”

His rooms, and sometime in the midst of his parents’ meal, and she blanched at Dorian’s offer of compensation. Inappropriate, she said, glancing about her until Dorian realized that he wouldn’t be the transgressor in such a situation. He settled on “thank you,” though she clearly remained in discomfort.

So passed the second day of confinement. Almost total isolation, broken only by Claudia’s meal delivery – Dorian had thought to ask why her in particular before it occurred to him that as bewildering as she clearly found him, she was probably the household expert on the unfamiliar and frankly nonsensical adult iteration of Dorian Pavus.

He talked to her, or at her, more accurately. A selfish thing – Claudia clearly would have preferred to be long gone, but Dorian would prefer not to start screaming alone in his rooms, which was the other option. Mostly he talked about his research. Of all topics on his mind, it was probably the least alarming.

Livia didn’t visit. Apparently she understood that Dorian had been ill, too delicate of health to receive callers. What point of the falsehood, Dorian couldn’t fathom; his circumstances and failures would hardly have changed, so unless his parents meant to annul the betrothal, it all seemed like putting off the inevitable. And an annulment would not only cast shame upon Dorian all over again, but the house itself, for once not even by association.

And what of the Bull? Did he believe that Dorian had covered for himself and fled? Did he worry? Or had he already rejoined the Beresaad to hunt their deserters, never to be seen again?

The last night they’d spent together haunted Dorian. Most obviously the sex, in the heady convergence of ending a long dry span but also possibly being the best he’d ever had, and oh, he thought far too often of the Bull’s hands spanning his hips, the full girth of his cock, which in hindsight should have terrified him – the teeth on his neck, the light but steady grip on his neck,  the way the Bull had fucked him through his orgasm before allowing himself to come. But even more so, the feeling of being held. How they had fallen asleep together and awoken in each other’s arm and somehow it had felt so instinctive, so comfortable. How gently he’d helped Dorian dress. And he’d kissed Dorian a warm farewell, and smiled when Dorian had confessed that the day ahead would be torture.

Dorian brought himself off to the memory of the Bull pinning him down and fucking him, but calmed himself asleep to the way they’d drowsily kissed each other awake.

When Claudia arrived on the third day’s morning, though, she bore a message rather than a meal. “Magister Halward requested your presence for breakfast,” she explained, not tentative precisely but entirely awkward nonetheless. “I’m sorry, but he insisted.”

“I understand,” Dorian said, because he did, and then tried on a smile, because Claudia didn’t.

He lost the smile sometime between exiting his rooms and reaching the main stairs down, but he’d hardly any cause to maintain it. What purpose would pretending at civility serve? Only to validate their assurance they had done right. When he stepped out to the veranda where breakfast typically took place, he didn’t even have to assume an air of disdain. It simply rose from his anger and settled into a sneer.

Silence reigned over the distribution of fruit; Dorian didn’t bother to meet anyone’s eyes. If his father wished to speak, he could open his own fucking mouth. Dorian had begun ripping pieces of flatbread with perhaps a touch more force than required when finally Halward cleared his throat.

A childish gesture, perhaps, but when Dorian turned to face his father, he’d scooped a mouthful of olives and cheese into his mouth. His mother made some small scornful noise, but didn’t expand upon it. Halward only sighed. “I had hoped that you would have cooled off enough to view the situation rationally,” he said, as if speaking of some minor setback, requiring a mere adjustment, and then, poof, Dorian would magically become a dutiful and well-adjusted heir, content to do only what was wished of him.

Dorian finished chewing, swallowed. “Do at least attempt to be more specific. I find myself embroiled in so very many situations lately, though I’m told this is the nature of life.”

Another nature of life, that this conversation should occur on such a lovely morning that he likely would’ve missed if not for his father’s summons. And yet his father had tainted it in the same action. “Your refusal to put any effort into rebuilding your respectability, as well you know,” said Halward, as he once had chastised Dorian for casting magic he couldn’t control outside the maintained practice room. There lay no particularly compelling reason to respond; Dorian rolled his eyes instead.

“I cannot understand your desire to throw your life away in the interest of – what? Inflicting your own perversions upon the population at large? A petty desire to punish us? You are twice over too old for this breed of selfish recklessness.” Halward paused, sipped at his coffee, set it down. Rubbed at his forehead.

“Dreamers of old forfend I make my own choices and see to my own consequences.” Dorian’s lips curled up. He’d the advantage now of nothing in particular to lose. Had he really so feared the prospect of getting out? It had left him with the faith he’d held in his father. “Or was that simply another technicality?”

Halward made to respond, but Aquinea got there first. “This is irrelevant to the actual at hand,” she said, shooting her husband a look that may have been identical to Dorian’s expression. Superiority, disdain; he’d learned it from the best. “Clearly Dorian has no intention of giving thought to your appeals to whatever better nature you believe he possesses.” She then turned the same face on Dorian. “We will be away on business overnight. Should you attempt to push past your restrictions, it will go the worse for you.”

Draining her own coffee, Aquinea stood and strode back indoors. Dorian found his appetite utterly departed, and the flatbread shredded into useless crumbs. He brought his coffee along when making his escape. And if some liquor found its way into that coffee, well, it had already become that sort of day.

In the early afternoon Aquinea found him in the library, tapping her booted foot until Dorian looked up at her. She’d changed since the morning, all hard lines and dark colours, and leather for the road. Her hair she’d bound in a tight and simple knot. Though she’d not dressed to intimidate Dorian specifically, she might as well have for effect it had.

“We depart shortly. I trust you will find some means of occupying yourself beyond your baser pursuits,” she said. “Clearly you have no regard for our reputation, but surely you have in you some consideration for your betrothed.”

Dorian sighed. “How lovely. I have yet to lay waste to quite everything I have touched.” Then he laughed, and made no attempt to avert the harshness in it. “I suppose I’ve still enough youth in me to taint the rest yet.”

Aquinea rolled her eyes, folded her arms. “Truth be told, the tarnishing of the family name is almost worth your father’s inability to raise a worthy son,” she said, no longer looking at Dorian at all. “His values die with him, Livia takes his place, and I to guide her when she realizes your uselessness in the matter.”

“Clearly I have _some_ use, at least.” The text to which Dorian returned his gaze wouldn’t resolve into focus, but it was a good enough excuse to look away as well. He gritted his teeth. “If only to bait your trap.”

“By great fortune alone.” Aquinea sniffed. “See to it that you leave the house in one piece upon our return.” A few seconds’ pause, and then she turned and clacked back out of the library. Dorian didn’t bother to look up and watch her go. A few counted breaths later, he shut the book with a loud snap.

He’d returned to pacing when the door swung open again, some unmeasured time later. Claudia had returned, another tray of food in her hands, now eyeing Dorian as she hesitated by the door. “Is… everything well, Master Dorian?”

“Please—” Dorian cut himself off; there was probably a reason she continued to ignore his requests to leave off the _master_. He sighed, and steadied himself as best he could. “Not in the slightest. Thank you.”

The tray went on the table once Dorian had shoved his unread books out of the way. Claudia hesitated a moment, as if expecting further direction, and then the aroma of the food she’d brought yanked Dorian from his brooding entirely. A curry, green with the lack of saffron, pungent with enough ginger to bring a grown man to his knees – they sold its like on the streets of Minrathous. Mornings proceeding particularly indulgent parties, Dorian had frequented one such stall, so much so that they recognized him by name and dropped the deference required of a soporati in the presence of an altus.

Such common dishes never reached the Pavus table.

“I apologise, if this is unsuitable. I’m not granted access to the fine ingredients, only our own fare—”

An oddity: Claudia had certainly offered enthusiastic apology before, but never with that kind of defensiveness. Dorian instinctively held up a hand to wave it off, but she froze in place. Wrong move. Of course. He looked back down to the tray, and beside the bowl of curry there were a pair of fried dumplings, a plate of lentils, a few rounds of the flatbread. Only water to drink, but Dorian had already been drunk once today and, grown sober, had no desire to repeat the experience. “You made this?”

“I – yes,” Claudia replied, wary again, and paused to search his face for an indication of something the nature of which Dorian could not guess. If she found it, she didn’t show it.. “Masters Halward and Aquinea mean to eat on the road. I wanted—”

She cut herself off. Expressing preferences, then, was also deemed inappropriate. Reading between the lines, though, filled in the rest of the thought. She’d wanted to spare her fellows the effort of preparing something lavish for a man who had happily devoured a very simple couscous, and drawn from the eastern cuisine she no doubt had grown up with.

So Dorian smiled. “I haven’t seen Qarinus in a while,” he told Claudia, and took up a piece of bread to dip into the lentils. “I found myself missing the street food. My thanks.”

Another whit more Claudia relaxed. “Will there be anything else?”

She had poor timing; Dorian had just shoved the lentils into his mouth. When he shook his head, Claudia bowed hers, the movement stilted. A second she waited for Dorian to swallow. “With your parents gone, will you prefer to take your meals on the veranda?”

Assent nearly crossed Dorian’s lips before he remembered. “Regrettably, I seem to be confined indoors for the time being. I will have to decline.”

With a nod Claudia turned to leave. At the door, though, she searched Dorian’s face again, but as before made no indication toward what she found there. “At the door to the stables,” she said, slow and enunciated as if speaking to a child. “Tuvio will take ill tonight, with this weather. Lucky for him that no one will notice if he falls asleep during his shift – but if they do, I hope they’ll show him some mercy.”

A wild hope spread through him – and then reality brought it crashing back down. “There is a barrier around the manor,” Dorian replied with a sigh. “I couldn’t break through it, so I assume it requires a key. And since my father has left… well, no matter. I thank you. You’ve no reason to help me.”

Claudia surveyed him for a moment, stepping back into the room. Somewhere along the past few days she certainly hadn’t warmed up to him, but seemed less wary. During interactions like this, she seemed to regard him more as an inconvenience than anything else, but that perhaps was the best Dorian could expect in their current situation. There would never be anything he could do to earn her respect; he knew that now. The best he could hope for was a lack of deference.

“It makes no difference to me what you do, my lord,” Claudia finally said, carefully neutral. “In the absence of the head of house, I deliver such information to his heir.”

A wave of great exhaustion broke over Dorian then, and he dropped his head to rest on one hand. His father’s heir. The proud and powerful altus Dorian of House Pavus, the _repository_ of his parents’ hopes and dreams, once on track to be Archon someday, imprisoned within his own home. Three days of isolation and restless sleep, inability to concentrate on his research or indeed any reading at all, had taken their toll. A nap would help, perhaps. With neither Halward nor Aquinea present – though Aquinea seemed disinterested in interacting with him further – no one would disturb him.

“However,” Claudia continued, “since the temporary head of house should have run of all aspects of the property, if he requested a key that I or any other household slave had, we would have to obey.”

Dorian looked up. Claudia had assumed an expression as neutral as her tone. Another piece of information he’d missed until now, how the slaves of the household chose their words as carefully as any politician. Through the weariness he smiled, crooked, and expected no response.

The discomfort of issuing a command only somewhat lessened with the tacit encouragement, but – he had committed himself to his escape. He would not turn down the opportunity. “Claudia,” he said as gently as he could manage, “I request of you a key to the barrier.”

Though her face shifted not a hair, Claudia inclined her head just the slightest bit off-kilter as if to give just the barest hint of conspiracy. It could easily have been a trick of the light. “I don’t have one myself, Master Dorian,” she admitted, “but by morning I will bring one to you.”

She bowed once more, then slipped out the library door much more smoothly than Aquinea had. Dorian looked down to the curry she’d brought, and smiled again.

He woke several hours later, the sunset coloring the light through the window to gold, half a bowl of curry a few inches away from his face. There was drool on the page he’d laid his head upon. With a groan he sat up, stretched out his shoulders and the crick in his neck, and cleared up after himself. The curry he carried with him up to his rooms, in anticipation of what surely would be a long night indeed.

This escape was possibly Dorian’s only chance, so there would be no returning. He wouldn’t be able to carry much with him, but he’d the night to figure out the essentials. Fewer books than he’d have preferred – he’d have to carry them on his back. The research and notes for his treatise, one good memory of the life he would leave behind. His staff. His birthright. For all the good it would do him, on the run. And, carefully wrapped in his cloak and after much debate, the pauldron from the gallery. Once he’d fetched it he lay down, just for a moment, and woke to the light of midday spilling through the curtains.

Claudia, true to her word, had slid the thin keystone underneath his door. Dorian pocketed it, deeming it wise to keep it on him; as far as he knew, Halward had yet to stoop so low as to search his rooms, but Halward lately had been proving many of his assumptions unpleasantly false. Better safe than sorry, et cetera, et cetera.

So far as Dorian could tell, his parents had not yet returned, but he packed hastily all the same. Some time later Claudia returned with lunch; a light affair, but she had no cause to have any idea he could have used a heartier meal. A note of guilt, then, that he would leave and she could not. The knowledge she at least wouldn’t suffer for it didn’t really mean much in the greater scheme of things.

Dorian ate, fidgeted, and after too long caught alternating between impatience and fear, fished out a blank piece of parchment. After a moment’s debate with himself, he added a second. He would need to write to Livia, who deserved a better apology than a letter could suffice. And – well, he would never see his father again.

It would be exponentially easier if the prospect didn’t hurt so much.

Dorian had the first two lines of his letter to Livia drafted when came a knock on his door. After a second of hesitation, he folded the two pages of parchment and secured them inside his shirt; they were the only truly damning pieces of evidence in the room. Then he went to open his door, to spare himself the indignity of intrusion.

One of the elves, unfamiliar yet, stood at attention just outside. “Master Halward requests your presence in his study,” he said, dispassionate.

So his parents had returned after all. Dorian sighed and shoved down the sudden spark of worry; Halward had no reason to suspect anything of him. Most likely he only faced yet another lecture on his failure as a son, perhaps another quiz on the minutes of some magisterial session Halward had assigned him to read and extrapolate from. Nothing for it, anyway, so Dorian spared his shaded room a final glance and shut the door behind him.

He was led in uncomfortable silence along the hallway – Dorian knew the way to his father's study, but no doubt Halward had no faith that he would report of his own volition. The hall's echo magnified the noise of their progress, and even Dorian's breathing seemed to reverberate. Only the occasional portrait and the line of lamp sconces muted the walls, to no effect he could detect.

The study door hung ajar but not shut; the elf rapped twice against the doorframe, and then pushed it open. Halward sat at his desk, fiddling with something, though he set it down when Dorian entered. Bookshelves ringed the desk, a barrier to the rest of the room to keep his more delicate projects undisturbed – clearly serving that function presently, judging by the static energy in the air. The hair at the back of Dorian's neck, cropped too short to do anything _but_ stand on its ends, nevertheless pricked at the skin. He suppressed the urge to shudder.

“Dorian,” his father said, but his voice held some aspect of kindness. Unbidden, Dorian's heart leapt in his chest, and this he couldn't push down. “I fear I have been overly hard on you, these past days. You are no child, after all, to be punished first and only reasoned with after.”

This was unexpected. All the biting replies Dorian had prepared made no sense in this new context, and he floundered for too long recalibrating his approach. “I... can scarcely disagree,” he settled upon.

“We find ourselves at an impasse, however,” Halward continued. “You cannot trust me to have your best interests at heart, and I cannot trust you not to jeopardize the second chance I have tried to build for you.” He smiled, sad, while Dorian watched him, wary but with some awful hope building in him. If Halward meant his words... perhaps he too could be reasoned with. Perhaps there was a chance, after all.

The parchment, only a thin layer of cloth from Dorian's skin, shifted guilt against his chest. _It has become clear that, despite everything, there is no place in your lives for me, nor in mine for you._ Had he been too hasty? Had both father and son acted in passion, making choices they both would come to regret?

“That second chance.” Dorian drew in a breath. “Your design will leave – has _left_ me miserable. I can't accept that.”

Halward nodded, surely having expected no less. “This has become clear to me. These days since my hasty judgement, I have been deliberating on a solution that we all can live with.” He stood then, purposefully. “I called you here to apologise, but also to present it to you. It isn't the smoothest of approaches, but I can promise you will not be consigned to a life of suffering.”

He had resumed fiddling with some object Dorian couldn't identify past the papers and drafting instruments that littered his desk. The feeling at the back of Dorian's neck caught his attention once again, a shiver now. Something was wrong. Something was—

“Gallus, if you please,” said Halward, and before Dorian had the time to connect the name with the elf who had escorted him here, Gallus had grabbed both his hands and pulled them roughly behind his back. Belatedly Dorian struggled, and nearly broke free before Halward flung a burst of electricity that locked his muscles in place long enough for Gallus to bind his wrists securely.

“What are you—”

Halward gazed solemnly back. “This is for your own good,” he said, voice the same timbre of regret as he afforded an unsuccessful vote in the Magisterium. “It's for the best. You'll see in time.”

Then he raised his hand to reveal the ornamented knife, and time ground to a halt.

Dorian heard only the void left behind his scream. Each jerk of his shoulders sent sharp, burning pain through joint and ligament. He couldn’t stop staring at the everite blade that glinted clean and wicked in his father’s hand.

It would not stay clean for long. That static magical energy zapped and ricocheted through the room as it would around any powerful working, but there was no flow to it yet. No spell had been cast. But only one school of magic demanded a knife.

A shove, and Dorian overbalanced. He crouched to right himself, as low as Gallus’ grip would allow – planted his feet against the slate floor, yanked his hands back. Gallus had significant strength, but Dorian was simply bigger, heavier, and had dropped his center of gravity. He held his ground. But Gallus held his wrists.

Between them and Halward, a wide glyph had been chalked on the floor, each line’s point of contact with the outer octagon marked with a focusing crystal. In any other context Dorian would have found it stunningly beautiful; in that moment he only felt violently ill. His wrists and shoulders burned, the ropes too tight, the angle all wrong. Giving up wasn’t an option. He gritted his teeth and bore it.

“Why must you insist on making things so difficult?” Halward asked, so _fucking_ calm, entirely unfazed by his own intentions. “If you would only see sense and allow me to help you—”

“How do you intend to _help_ by tying me up and, what, threatening me with blood magic?” Dorian’s breath came in gasps with his exertion, but he turned to stare his father down with all the fury within him. “You expect this to _convince_ me?”

“There is no convincing you.” Halward looked to him, beseeching, and Gallus dragged Dorian a few inches forward in that moment of distraction. “I only want what’s best for you, Dorian. You will never be happy, loving men!”

“I _was_ happy!”

Warm grey skin, gold from the fire, backlit in that otherworldly blue; wide enveloping hands that had been so rough and so tender, and that once had held Dorian’s hand and not asked a thing more. Oh, Dorian had been happy. And perhaps – perhaps—

“No,” said Halward, and he looked _sad_ , as if Dorian’s whole being were some kind of tragedy, as if he had any right at all while standing with a knife and having his own fucking son dragged into some kind of blood ritual. He’d taught Dorian the basics of glyphs here, drawing tiny spells in chalk for Dorian to practice by rote, and Dorian had so revered him then— “You never did learn objectivity. Hedonism has clouded your judgement.”

Around them the air buzzed, and the taste of magic suddenly nauseated. It clung like sweat to Dorian’s skin. Barely a moment of weakness, and Gallus heaved him to his feet. Another jolt of electricity from his father’s knife rendered useless Dorian’s limbs, and in that brief moment Gallus hauled him to the edge of the glyph, which upon further inspection was less a glyph but rather a map of complex sigils, a circuit.

Too late he noticed the smaller glyph, not in chalk but in faint green lines. Gallus released him into it, but once within the glyph sprung into life. Containment. The key weighed heavy on Dorian’s chest, so close and yet inaccessible. “Stop this,” he said, voice far too high and too close to begging, while the barrier refused again and again to budge against his shoulders as he shoved against it. “Father, please—”

“This will fix you!” Halward raised both hands. “You won’t have to hide anymore! You’ll finally be free to be yourself, without judgement – isn’t this what you’ve always sought?”

Horror dropped into Dorian’s stomach, while bile rose in his throat. He swallowed it down, but it burned, and he recoiled, eyes wide, unable to tear them away from his father’s earnest face. _This will fix you._ Blood magic, to alter the mind.

“Your assistance, Gallus,” Halward said, while Dorian remained frozen in place. Gallus, slave and long trusted retainer, stepped forward without hesitation, across the boundaries of chalk. Halward stepped forward – spun him around – raised the hand, the hand with the knife – Gallus’ eyes open wide and terrified – drew the knife across Gallus’ throat—

The blood, spattered across Dorian’s face, was still hot. It trickled into Dorian’s mouth, and he tore through the abused lining of his throat in a scream unvoiced. Gallus lay in the center of the chalk sigil map, wide-eyed and still bleeding as violently as the manner of his end. The charged air keened with massing power, building around Halward's spotless hands, and Dorian didn't think, only reacted, throwing his left shoulder forward and _shoving_ all the magic in him through it, raw and unstable, to crash against Gallus's body in the center of sigil map.

For an instant, every chalk line lit up like magnesium fire, and Dorian hid his eyes just in time before the whole room exploded.

A strangled cry behind him. His back hit something hard, unsolid; he tumbled through it as something rough and heavy battered his head, his chest, and something burned his skin, and he hit the ground, and the whole building around him groaned and shook.

Father. Nothing but smoke in the workroom. Nothing but embers where the power lived in Dorian’s chest, between his lungs, and they burned too. Mother. Somewhere unknown in the house. Cold indifference armed with a staff, merciless to enemies. Dorian’s legs wouldn’t hold him up to stand. Hands still tied behind him. But he couldn’t stay here, he couldn’t—

He shoved himself forward, half-lying on the floor, bracing himself against shattered and crumbling marble, and his shoulders scraped against it. Blood strong in the air, in his mouth, each inhale calling back the scent and the taste of it until he had to stop and retch, once, twice, again, even after he’d emptied his stomach.

Stairs. He flung himself down, tucking his head, ravaging his clothing and skin against the debris. A broken cry, heard from far away, punching out his own throat. The world blurred, spun, flames against his skin, and Dorian couldn’t catch his breath, and he was burning—

“Dorian!”

Cool hands, a sudden shift, the heat abated but the burning ceaseless, and a voice that panicked, spoke too quickly. “Dorian!” The only word he recognized.

A dark, thick shape around a dark oval, which resolved into familiar pits and shadows. Recognition, suddenly, of the voice. Dorian blinked hot, dried eyes. “Livia?”

“It’s all right,” she said, and gathered him upright, to her chest, wrapping her arms around his back. Her hands stilled upon encountering his bound wrists, and then the ropes snapped and loosened and Dorian’s arms fell to each side of him.

His voice cracked and died. “He was going to – he was—”

Livia held him tighter, and then relaxed her arms only to keep him sitting up. “I’m getting you out of here. Can you stand?” Dorian shook his head. “I’m going to pull you up, your legs don’t seem broken. Lean on me.”

Even warned, even with Lydia’s gentleness, Dorian shuddered as she lifted him to his feet. Gallus had dragged him upright and into the glyph of containment. Gallus lay dead and bloodless somewhere upstairs in the rubble. “One foot in front of the other,” Livia said, wrapping Dorian’s arm over her shoulders and hers around his waist. Step forward. Steady now.

One foot in front of the other, they limped through the smashed front door.

The ground barraged his feet, the air churning around him, smoke and the bright tang of blood burnt into his nostrils so that every few steps he collapsed to retch, empty stomach constricting on itself and bile burning the lining of his throat ever more. In his ears, the roar of flames, and his skin was too dry, and all that kept him blundering forward were two anchor points: one that held his left arm in place against the shelf of Livia’s shoulders, the other wrapped around his waist.

His eyes streamed, dry and burning as the rest of him, leaving his vision ruined but not enough to hide the dark red splotches on his free arm, his torso, his legs. He couldn’t raise his head to look away. And when he closed his eyes, he saw only—

Pressure, against the shell of his ear, and humidity within it. Words. Dorian breathed in, shallow but as slow as he could manage, tried to will the roaring away. “Dorian,” Livia was saying as if from a far distance, and must have said before. “We’re out of the house, we escaped, you’re all right.”

Dorian summoned his voice, and the cracked moan he mustered sent him into a coughing fit, and then he was retching again, choking out bile, while the hand holding his left arm in place squeezed the wrist. He smelled blood, tasted it, couldn’t get it out, and the ashen face of the dead man – dead slave, and what revulsion accompanied the thought now – hung behind his eyelids.

When he ceased convulsing, he resorted to a whisper. “Claudia,” he said, a name with a face, standing in the library that must only hold blackened pages and broken marble now. He reached with his free hand to find the shoulder of Livia’s ruined dress, and clutched at the fabric when he found it. “She’s a – she’s in the kitchen—”

A moment passes, then Livia nodded. “Let me get you a little farther away first. Then I’ll go back to look for her.”

She moved him forward, pushing him just enough to keep up momentum. Dorian drifted until he found himself being set down, leaning forward on his knees. “Try not to lie down,” Livia said, and rubbed his forehead softly before drawing away again.

Left to his own devices, Dorian returned to drifting, far from his battered body, pain fading into a thick haze inside and around him. Warm wind breezing through date palms washed through him, the rise and fall of voices, a hand warm on his. Let’s be bold, he’d said. Give them something to talk about. I’ve heard them speak of worse with my name attached.

A cooler wind set in opposition against a warm fire, the hand turned heavy, soft but not tentative at all. Only one voice, low and soothing, and then nothing but rushing wind, crackling fire.

A table he’d sat at, book beneath his fingers, a suffused with a soaring pride, a hand on his shoulder this time, praise on his father’s lips—

Dorian jolted from his reverie, sitting up straight for moment before his strength wore out and he had to lean once more against his knees. His heart hammered painful beneath his ribs. He’d felt happiness for that abrupt instant, forgot how the father he loved had gone, or perhaps never even was, and the man in his place almost certainly had died anyway. And would he even mourn his son if yet he lived?

No voice remained to Dorian, and so the sob heaved into his arms was silent, dry. No moisture remained in his eyes to cry with. Everything in him had numbed except the clenching pain almost visceral inside his throat and chest, and it wracked him all the more for its isolation.

A hand brushed the back of his head where his hair grew longer. He looked up, slowly, a heavy weight holding him down, to see Livia’s worried face hovering over him. “I found Claudia,” she said, and waved her other hand forward.

Claudia crouched into view. “Are you dying?”

Disaster had apparently done wonders for her assertiveness. Dorian smiled at her frown – or at least, made an attempt. “I don’t believe so,” he rasped.

“Then what did you need?”

When he’d asked Livia to find her, Dorian hadn’t really had a reason he understood, but as coherence slowly built in his mind, so did the shape of what he had to do. Carefully he drew the parchment from the safety of his shirt. He looked to Livia, who surveyed him a moment and then dug into the bag Dorian hadn’t realized she was carrying, to pull out dip pen and ink.

“Can you use a pen?” she asked, not quite offering them yet.

It turned out that he could not. Dorian's hand shook too much, and Livia had to hold it steady before he could write at all. There was no point in elegance when he could barely sustain coherent thought – but then, the plan involved the Magisterium thinking he had died after penning these documents, so that was probably for the best, anyway. Halward's face, sitting at the desk, swam into his vision. That calm. _Not now, Dorian. Show me your work, Dorian. It's for your own good, Dorian—_

His hands fell loose, pen dropping to the grass, smoke in his nose and the sick tang of blood at the back of his tongue—

“Naturalisation.” Livia's voice, brusque, snapped him back into the moment. Dorian stared dumbly her way, the word foreign in its irrelevance. “That's the term you want.”

Right. The writ of release. Livia pressed the pen back into his hand, and he returned it to the parchment. His eyes wandered up, though, just a moment, and caught Claudia's eyes widening in surprise. All Dorian could manage for her was an uncertain smile, but for the first time she responded in kind.

An age later, he set the pen down below the third and final document, and rested weak arms against his thighs. With careful fingers, Livia reached down the back of Dorian's shirt to pull free the birthright worn around his neck. “I'm going to use magic to heat some wax,” she said, and Dorian didn't piece her meaning together until she'd pulled beeswax from her kit and summoned a palmful of flame to melt it in.

Hands caught Dorian's arms, the arms he couldn't move, he couldn't move any of his limbs, but there were hands to restrain him – he jerked himself away, felt himself fall – screamed, but only rasping voicelessly – but the hands fell away. Slow feeling returned with pins and needles to his body, and he curled in on himself, and choked on the dust and smoke in the air. There were walls around him, stone under him, encasing him—

Dorian with great effort opened his eyes. He had collapsed against soft grass, not marble, and the lawn stretched out around him, open space. At his feet, Claudia crouched, watching him suspiciously, hands still hovering. Behind her stood Livia with the stamped parchment.

“You're safe,” Livia told him after a moment, stepping forward slowly, holding out his birthright. A coughing fit took Dorian then, jerking him upright, but as quickly as it began it ended, leaving him to scrub at his face and steady his breath.

She couldn't know that, but Dorian took the gesture for what it meant. The ritual hadn't worked. He had escaped. The rest he could deal with later.

“You have to,” Dorian whispered, harsh; both Livia and Claudia leaned in to hear. “Livia. You have to bring these to Qarinus. Not the copy.” He cleared his throat. It made no difference except to aggravate the feeling of rawness, of burning, and to let him hack up phlegm and ash. “Claudia. That one’s for you. Take it to everyone else. It says you’re free.”

Claudia snatched the second half-page from Livia and stared at it, as if by looking hard enough the characters would begin to make sense. “This will get us out safe?”

“So long as you stay together, yes,” said Livia, straightening the pair of documents she still held. “I will give you an address to find me in Minrathous, or to write to, and when the dust settles,” and here she paused to crack a tired grin, “so to speak, I can provide as many witnessed duplicates as any of you can use. Otherwise, there won’t be an official bounty for you, but I cannot protect you from those who would prey upon you regardless.”

A decisive nod, and Claudia stood up. “Tell the address to me. We take care of our own, altus.”

“Thank you,” Dorian rasped. Both women looked down to where he sat. It was Claudia offered him a hand up, and when he accepted she yanked him roughly to his feet. When he wavered, Livia held a hand against his back.

“You’ll come with me to Qarinus, of course,” she said, smoothing the shoulders Dorian’s ruined robes. “We don’t need to marry, of course, but it may assist your transition to head of House Pavus, or afford you some protection if your father yet lives…”

Dorian shook his head, and then had to bring up a hand to steady himself on Livia’s shoulder. “I can't,” he said, and nearly choked again on ash and another sob that threatened to scrape free. “I'm sorry – _kaffas_ , Livia, I'm sorry—”

She only shook her head. “You don't need to apologise. Not to me.”

They looked at each other, words clattering distantly against each other, somewhere outside the dullness to Dorian's awareness. His tongue clung clumsy to the top of his mouth. The smell of blood kept teasing at his nose, a lightning shock every time. He couldn't go. He couldn't stay.

“You could come with us.” Claudia spoke slow, guarded. It took Dorian a long time to turn to her. “You wouldn't be _welcome_ , but we could use your help.”

Livia drew a quick breath in, something to say, but Dorian shook his head. “I have... somewhere I can go. But... thank you.” He breathed through his nose and out his mouth, swallowed down the phlegm he couldn't cough up. “Forgive me.”

Shrugging, Claudia said, “We don't need you. But it wouldn't be pity or obligation, letting you join.”

“Good luck,” Dorian whispered, and she nodded once to him, once to Livia, and then walked back toward the small crowd gathered outside the wreckage. A previously unseen confidence held her back straight, planted her feet solid.

The wind blew cold against Dorian's bared skin, and he shivered, too exhausted to fight it off. Livia tightened her hold around his back, curling him around closer to her. “Will he take care of you?” Her other hand she brought to card through Dorian's hair. “When you go to him. Will he keep you safe?”

“I trust him,” Dorian told her. It was the best answer he knew.

Livia urged him to sit and wait for her, and ran back to the remains of the manor. Dorian sat with his head against his knees as before and breathed in, out, in, out again. Some unmeasured time later Livia returned with a staff – Dorian's staff, charred but whole – and the smaller pack he’d left in his room. Inside he found a quiet flicker of relief; his research had all survived, and the pauldron with it. Above it a cloak, a waterskin, a withered mango, and what looked to be the remnants of some meal eaten recently. Food could have belonged to another lifetime. If not for the dull ache of all his bruises, Dorian could have believed himself dead.

“I found your other pack,” Livia said, “but I got there too late to save it from the fire. I’m sorry.”

Dorian wheezed out what he realized immediately after would have been a laugh. “I set the fire. I’m to blame entirely–” he had to pause to cough, and it too clawed its way out of his mouth.

“You saved yourself.” Livia brought her hand up to carefully rest on his shoulder. “That’s what’s important.”

The food Dorian ate, the water he drank – slowly, Livia cautioned him. When she helped him to his feet again, vertigo took Dorian, but it faded soon. He found he could stand, and with assistance, walk.

He declined a ride away, but when Livia managed to coax his reasons out she insisted at least upon helping him across the lawn. “Be careful,” she said. “I'll find you when the fuss dies down.”

“You've been a good friend,” Dorian told her, and summoned a weak smile. “I find that, apparently, I will miss you a great deal.”

Livia hugged him, pinned the cloak around his shoulders and pressed the pack into his hands. Clasping Dorian's hand once more, she made as if to say something, but only shook her head and smiled back, and then she was walking away. She threw looks back at Dorian as she went, until he couldn't bear it any longer, and had to commit himself to the task of walking on his own.   

A fog took Dorian as he stumbled through the jungle. A night-blooming flower caught his eye. Sometime later, the sudden movement of some ground-dwelling animal. They passed, and with them his awareness.

In time unmeasured, with no real idea of how he arrived, he found himself half-falling into the beacon clearing. He blinked a few times with the sudden light, and only then noticed the Bull, already standing, hurrying forward. Dorian managed to stay upright just long enough for the Bull to reach him, before his knees buckled under him.

“Dorian,” the Bull said, voice tight, having barely caught him. “Shit, I heard the explosion.” He rubbed Dorian's back with one hand, radiating warmth, and against all likelihood Dorian found himself relaxing. The Bull's other arm gripped him slightly harder. “I should've...”

He didn't finish the thought. It couldn't have been important, though; nothing seemed important outside the circle of his arms, and that should've been worrying. It was not. After everything else that had happened, Dorian could allow it. He didn't really have anything – or anyone – else to lean on.

Quite literally speaking, actually. Between the two of them they got Dorian across the clearing to rest against the beacon itself. The Bull considered him for a moment, worry written between his brows, and then nodded once. Before Dorian could ask, the Bull had gripped the wheel on the side of the beacon, and begun turning it, the old metal creaking and groaning with the strain. Dorian couldn't turn himself far enough around to watch, but after a few minutes of this the Bull finished. There was a clank and a few bumps, and then he returned to Dorian's view and kneeled before him with his prize.

“Thought you said it wasn't a well,” Dorian whispered.

The Bull shrugged, dipping a scrap of cloth he'd conjured up from somewhere into the cloudy water drawn from the beacon. “It's not. Doesn't mean it can't have water in it anyway.” Wringing out the rag, he hesitated again, and then began wiping Dorian's face. Even a few swipes sent relief flooding through Dorian's whole body with the anticipation of cleansing.

“Shit,” the Bull said again, dipping the rag again. “What happened?”

Dorian's throat locked up, and he must have shown his panic, because the Bull sat back on his haunches. “It’s all right,” he said after a moment, in a softer voice, and cupped his hands to bring water to Dorian’s mouth. It took another moment for Dorian to register his intent and drink. It might embarrass him later, but in the now he knew only relief. The Bull didn’t smile, but there was a tenderness in his eye. “You don't have to answer that.”

But Dorian did. He swallowed a few times, to clear his throat, and when he spoke found his voice had returned. “It was – my father, he,” and Dorian had to cough, to swallow again, “he said it would make me happier. That—” and here he found the venom that Halward Pavus deserved— “it was for my own good.”

“What did he do?” The Bull took up the rag again, returning to Dorian’s grimy face to clear the filth away. His other hand was soft against Dorian’s jaw, supporting him rather than holding him still. Dorian shut his eyes and leaned into it, shaking again.

“He tried… he tried to _change_ me.” To his horror, his eyes filled, one tear spilling down his cheek, and then another and another. “The two ethics he stood by above all, never mistreat a slave, never resort to blood magic. But he killed Gallus, and used his blood to—”

The Bull’s face hardened, clearly putting the pieces together. Wiping the last of the filth from Dorian’s face, he rinsed the rag again and began the process anew on Dorian’s hair and neck. “You fought back,” he finished. “That was the explosion.”

“I don’t know if he survived,” Dorian whispered, throat tight, undoing all his effort to relax himself. The Bull hummed, a simple, soothing sound. A deep inhale. “Him, or my mother, or – however many slaves. I know some of them got out, but they can’t all have been so fortunate…”

Softly the Bull slid his free hand around to the clean back of Dorian’s neck, but when he tangled his fingers in Dorian’s hair they pulled. “And the people who lived?”

“Free now.” Dorian allowed his head to fall. “Livia, she helped me write a document to make it official. It seemed the least I could do.”

“Hey,” said the Bull, tipping up Dorian’s chin again. “I’m proud of you.”

Dorian choked, and tears threatened again. “It wasn’t enough. I put my safety ahead of theirs, and now–” then he had to swallow once more before he could go on– “my father only killed his retainer, and I have – far more blood on my hands.”

“Hey,” the Bull repeated, “hey,” and Dorian cried out and fell forward against him. The Bull dropped his rag into the bucket and pulled Dorian in to hold him while he gasped and sobbed into the hollow of the Bull’s throat. All the while the Bull stroked his back and kept holding the base of his skull, softly, softly.

After an unmeasurable period of time, Dorian slowly calmed, until he was only sniffing and taking in sharp inhales at slower and slower intervals. The Bull released him, though he didn’t put much space between them.

“I’m going to take off your shirt and robe,” he said, rubbing Dorian’s shoulders. “They’re gonna need cleaning. So will you.”

Dorian nodded rather than trusting himself to speak yet. Then the Bull set to it, hands careful where once they had been rough, unclipping the filthy robe and then opening each buckle of Dorian’s shirt with precise fingers. He pulled the shirt off and then frowned at whatever else he’d uncovered.

“It looks worse than it feels,” Dorian said, clipped, but at last without the threat of immediately breaking down again. “I did manage to survive. To some degree, anyway.”

The Bull met his gaze squarely, but the dubious reply hinted in his expression remained unspoken. He wrung out the rag again and drew it oh-so-gently over Dorian’s left shoulder, then the right, while Dorian forced himself to relax past the sting. The water soothed the scrapes and burns after the first moment of discomfort.

“Legs,” the Bull murmured after some indistinct amount of time, rag stilling at the small of Dorian’s back. He ended up having to help, holding Dorian up off the ground enough to fumble out of his trousers, laying Dorian’s cloak down to sit upon.

By the time the Bull had washed away the last of the blood, soot, and sweat, the worst of the burns had eased, the skin too smooth and sensitive but no longer hurting of its own volition. Dorian tentatively poked at the burn that had blistered his shoulder so badly and felt a responding shock of pain, but he found he could bear it.  Above them the wind howled through the canopy, and gusted through the clearing from the east and north, along the ruins of the old walls and the remnants of the road between them. It was as ever too humid a wind to dry, but just the slightest chill felt good against Dorian’s bare skin.

“How are you feeling?” asked the Bull, dropping the rag in the bucket along with Dorian’s ruined clothes, sans cloak, and then pulling the whole thing over so Dorian could continue leaning against him. Somehow throughout the scrubbing process the water remained clear even as the clothes grew cleaner. Dorian watched the Bull’s hands shift and squeeze, wide and scarred. They’d been so rough and then so gentle, ever strong and grounding.

The Bull nudged him with a knee. “Dorian?”

He’d asked a question. Dorian dragged his eyes back up to the Bull’s face, then almost had to look away again at the worry he found there. Words struggled to fit together in his head and then stumbled on his tongue. “Untethered,” he managed as his vision unfocused without consulting him on the matter. “I don’t… nothing could possibly have gone so wrong. And I should have been alone.”

The Bull’s hand found Dorian’s knee. “You _never_ should’ve been alone,” he said, fierce, and Dorian gasped against his shoulder like the precursor to a sob. The Bull left off scrubbing to put the other arm around him, steadying, until the moment had passed, and only then did he loosen his hold.

“I’m going to hang your clothes on the wall right there.” The Bull pointed to the section nearest them, which would have been aggravating in its condescension at any other time. But the Bull didn’t condescend, and the gesture reassured more than Dorian preferred. “I want you to stand up and dump the rest of this over your head. Can you do that for me?”

When Dorian took a deep breath in, the Bull squeezed his knee once more, and drew from him a momentary smile. Something in Dorian’s chest clenched while the rest all fell away, but he knew its name by now. “I suppose, if only with great effort, I might manage it.”

"That's the Dorian I know," said the Bull, and for it he smiled back far too soft before getting to his feet. He wrung out the sodden mess of Dorian's clothes, then left the bucket out for him.

Standing took a great deal of effort, and lifting more so, but neither pained him. He only shook with it. But the water steadied him as the Bull had done, allowing him to remain standing and further easing the hypersensitivity of his skin. The detritus that clung to his legs rinsed away with it.

He sat back down on his cloak when he'd finished, as the Bull lowered the bucket back into the well to draw more water up. The crank's grating might have dragged like claws through Dorian's skull at another time, but in the moment the organic texture of it comforted him instead.

“Have another drink,” the Bull said, offering the bucket again. Rather than attempt not to spill, Dorian set it down. He cupped his hands as the Bull had and brought water to his lips until the thirst he’d not even noticed, not since the Bull had begun washing him, was quenched.

Finished, he set the bucket aside, and then made the mistake of looking up at the Bull. What had Dorian expected of him? Nothing so well-defined as what the Bull had given. And now here Dorian sat, vulnerabilities as bared as his skin, and he hadn’t the slightest idea what to do about it.

But the Bull knelt down before him, laying hands on Dorian’s crossed legs. No pressure, only weight. “What do you need?” he asked, lowly. And here, the decision Dorian couldn’t make, but he _wanted_ , and maybe that was close enough.

The words stuck in his throat. One didn’t ask for anything outside of sex, only hinted or accepted, so it was safe, so there was plausible deniability. He’d come so close to throwing the whole boundary out the window and asking -- asking Rilienus to stay. Or to kiss him, or even just to touch. The words had stuck in his throat then, too. That was how it had to be, living under the watchful eye of the powerful and elite. But Dorian wasn’t there anymore.

He swallowed once, and with more confidence than he felt -- though that said very little -- smoothed out the lump in his throat. “Can you… would you just hold me?”

The Bull bent to kiss just above his hand laid on Dorian’s lower thigh. “Think I can do that,” he said, smiling, and as much as Dorian wanted to look anywhere else, he couldn’t bear to wrench his eyes away.

It took some maneuvering to get the Bull’s back against the well without breaking contact -- somehow he’d known before Dorian how essential it was. But once settled he pulled Dorian into his lap to curl against his chest, the right height for Dorian settle into the crook of his neck. With the hand not holding Dorian in place, the Bull rubbed his back. “It’s safe to relax,” he murmured, turning his face to say it into Dorian’s ear. “I’ve got you.”

In the Bull's arms Dorian almost did feel safe. The shock and terror still lurked, sending out a burst of adrenaline from time to time, but when his thoughts ventured too close to danger they jolted away. He floated, only the Bull solid around him as an anchor. _I've got you_ , the Bull had said, and tightened his hold from time to time to say it again.

Time passed, an unmeasurable amount. Dorian's hands roved, just to feel the shape of the Bull's body and the tentative familiarity of it. His legs stiffened; he shifted to stretch them. The wind cooled his back where the Bull's arms didn't hold. Suddenly it wasn't enough, still too far apart, and with some low whimper he’d never admit to, Dorian turned to press himself flat against the Bull’s chest, clinging with both hands.

The Bull inhaled sharply and pulled him all the tighter in, breathed out his name, and Dorian gasped again to lungs suddenly emptied of air. “Please,” he said, not even knowing what he was asking for. The Bull must have known, though; he tilted Dorian’s jaw and turned his head for a kiss. When Dorian moaned, emotions too intense to bear, the Bull opened his mouth to swallow it. Helplessly Dorian let him in. He drew a hand up to hold to the Bull’s right horn, arched his back to spare both their necks.

“Anything,” the Bull said into his mouth, and Dorian crushed their mouths even closer, to the point of pain, and yet it still wasn’t close enough.

He couldn’t breathe but in ragged rushes through his nose, lightheaded and floating but for the arms around him, the skin they held him against. He could be swallowed whole and still yearn for more. Desperation held him in place as surely as any physical contact. “ _Bull_.”

The Bull pulled Dorian’s face back enough to separate their faces, and Dorian barely repressed a sob. “Why are you _stopping_?” he demanded instead, but his voice cracked with it. “Why--”

“Tell me what you need,” the Bull said into the space between them. “Tell me what I can do.”

 _You_ , Dorian almost said, but choked it back. “I need, I need,” he said, and exhaled shakily through his mouth, “can you--”

He knew, suddenly, what he could ask for, what he needed that could be said aloud. “Will you fuck me?”

“I can do that,” said the Bull, voice husking without yet a sign of arousal. Somehow that didn’t matter. It wasn’t the orgasm that Dorian needed, just the internal connection, just another way to tether him down.

The Bull rearranged Dorian in his lap to sit astride him, slow movements of his hands taking on intent rather than simply soothing. Dorian leaned back up to kiss him again, eyes squeezing shut, second hand coming up to hold onto the Bull’s other horn, as the Bull’s hands explored the lines of his hips and the curves of his thighs. This time they ventured inward, thumbs rubbing small circles. The first wash of pleasure passed slowly through him, gentling, and he moaned softly into the Bull’s mouth.

Humming, the Bull released Dorian’s thighs to run hands up Dorian’s sides and bring them to rest against Dorian’s jaw. “Let me take care of you, this time,” he said, and the vibration of his voice traveled from Dorian’s teeth the whole of Dorian’s skull, a warm buzz. Dorian rolled slowly at the hips, traveling from point to point of pressure until the Bull did begin to stir beneath him.

They progressed slowly, moving together with intensity but no hurry, mouths rarely parting. When Dorian would open his eyes it was to find the Bull watching him already, tender in his eye and the smile that teased at it. Not happiness. Perhaps something bigger.

All the while the Bull spoke low into his mouth, words indistinct but so gentle, approval in his tone with each touch of Dorian’s cock. His hands roved, the lightest brush to a heavy drag across Dorian’s skin, while Dorian held to his horns and continued rolling against him.

When he first began to stretch Dorian open, fingers coated in water from the beacon, he took the same slow pace -- but even the one finger sent relief flooding through Dorian. He did sob that time. The Bull soothed with his free hand, rubbing slow circles within Dorian as he’d done without.

The slow pace set still felt too short when the Bull had opened him up as far as three fingers at an awkward angle could accomplish, but the brief moment of emptiness while the Bull cleaned his hand and coated himself could have broken Dorian before the Bull lined them up and slid smooth and gradually in. The Bull didn’t thrust, rather followed Dorian’s movement, drawing back and lifting forward in time, still deep within him. They stayed that way far longer than Dorian had ever managed with in any other assignation, but it was almost perfect like this, undulating around the Bull seated deep within him, stretched and full. When Dorian finally came he’d only needed the pressure inside him and the friction of his cock against the Bull’s stomach. The Bull still moved with him, and the sensation was still so intense and so comforting. In some distant corner of his mind he managed to be impressed by Qunari stamina, but it was mostly lost in the bliss overcome the rest of him.

It might have been long hours rather than long minutes, but eventually the Bull shuddered and held still Dorian’s hips while orgasm broke over him, rocking into Dorian through his long release and the aftershocks that. It was Dorian who moaned while the Bull bit into his shoulder, and again when the Bull’s movements slowly ceased.

He seemed content to let Dorian stay where he was, sweat cooling on both of them, lethargic in the aftermath. They’d have to break apart at some point soon, presumably, but Dorian wasn’t ready yet. He let his head fall back to the Bull’s shoulder, mouthing at his throat, while the Bull stroked his back, still holding him close.

Eventually, though, Dorian’s legs began to cramp, and with a sigh he pulled free of the Bull’s cock to return to his original position sitting sidewise across the Bull’s lap.

“Thank you,” he said, and the Bull kissed _you’re welcome_ against his lips.

He stroked Dorian’s hair, and perhaps this also was too much, but Dorian couldn’t find it in himself to care. If necessary, he could always deny it later. It didn’t seem so important now.

And then everything crashed down in an instant. “I was worried I wouldn’t see you again,” said the Bull, and Dorian _remembered_ in a rush, with all the clarity he’d lost until now. The Beresaad. The upcoming hunt. The time they had together which had inexorably been running out.

“When?” Dorian sat up straight and tried his voice level. It rose in pitch anyway. “How long do w– do you have?”

The Bull stilled his hand around Dorian’s waist, dropped the other from Dorian’s hair. “Tonight,” he said, meeting Dorian’s gaze, and he doesn’t sound happy but he certainly doesn’t sound anything else either.

“Tonight,” Dorian echoed, as the bottom dropped out of his stomach all over again.

No tease about Dorian’s stellar hearing. The Bull only nodded. “I leave in the morning to join the hunt.”

Dorian had known this was coming from the day they met. He hadn’t forgotten, throughout the past month, not beyond the horror of the earlier evening. And that… He sucked in a breath and willed the thought away. The point was that he should have been ready. Devastation perhaps he couldn’t avoid, but in this moment he felt only burning fury.

“Is it that important that I not witness it?” he asked in a voice grown sharp. The Bull made some kind of aborted movement, but his face remained inscrutable. Dorian wanted to crack it open. “Would you at least allow me to be there to say goodbye?”

The Bull only sighed where he should felt something stronger, and either he truly had no objection to this reality or he still didn’t care to let Dorian see it. This after Dorian had effectively bared his soul to him. This while he still cradled Dorian in his lap.

“You can’t be there,” he said. “I’m turning myself in for re-education after the hunt. If they decide you were a corrupting influence—”

“Because I’ve certainly never been accused of _that_ —”

The Bull brought his free hand to Dorian’s cheek; Dorian pulled away. When he stood, the Bull followed, but didn’t try to touch him again. “Dorian, the best you can hope for is that they’ll kill you.”

The nerve of him to say it so tenderly. Here, in the one place Dorian had believed himself safe and accepted – and here he was, another guilty secret. Corrupting. Needing to be hidden away, just to keep up _appearances_. His hands curled into fists, and he didn’t intend it, but he allowed it anyway.

“And this is what you want so badly to belong to? So worth it that you’re willing to be _re-educated_ to stay?”

As he’d needed so badly to be completely enveloped in the Bull’s touch barely a minute or two ago, Dorian now yearned to _hurt_ him until they matched. Until the Bull understood exactly what he’d just done.

 “This is what I _am_ ,” the Bull said with maddening certainty. Despite the bite of Dorian’s nails into his own palms and despite his focused breathing, the fire flared up again, and when the Bull caught his gaze again Dorian glared all the more fiercely for it. The gall of him, to be so unaffected. “It has nothing to do with what I want.” The Bull paused. “Asit tal-eb.”

A flash of memory: Dorian had lost an afternoon and the evening that followed to a book, _Early Highways: Retracing the Footsteps of Legend_. A frustrating read, but somewhat less useless than the rest as it actually ventured to translate a few Qunlat words the author had compiled. That interminably dull chapter had contained a series of anecdotes, each more dubious than the last – though, given current evidence, perhaps not quite as dubious as he’d originally thought. One woman alleged to have inquired of a Qunari she encountered about the ravaging of Tevinter, and the Qunari had responded simply. _Asit tal-eb._ It is to be.

Dorian’s fist flew out before he registered pulling it back to swing. The collision with the Bull’s jaw made the jarring pain of knuckle against bone entirely worth it. He followed through the strike. If the Bull cared to reciprocate, Dorian’s weakness and unstable footing, his diverted area of vision, would give him all the advantage he could possibly want. He should. Armed with nothing else, Dorian held close to spite and unkindness.

But when he finished the curve of his strike and steadied himself, the Bull was watching him again with the same lack of reaction, like he hadn’t even felt it. Like he hadn’t been surprised at all. Like he had already forgiven it.

“ _Fuck_ that,” Dorian snapped, but only because he couldn’t shout. “What was it you said about making my own choices? About not letting myself be convinced that I’m doomed to unhappiness? Did you actually mean a word of it?” He nearly threw out his other hand to punch, but the Bull hadn’t even responded to the first.

Once again the Bull sighed. “It’s different for me.”

“Because _this is what you are_?” Dorian laughed, without any real humor, and it rang cruel in his ears like he’d intended. “Just a mindless beast of burden? Or are you just _afraid_? I don’t see any _fucking_ chains on you either!”

“Under the Qun—”

“Funny how that never stopped you from making judgement calls on _my_ life!”

The Bull only looked at him, but Dorian suddenly found himself deflating, out of things to say. He’d somehow missed how this entire time the Bull had never separated himself from the collective entity of the Qun. _Tell me what you need_ , he’d asked, because it hadn’t been about anyone but Dorian. So convinced of his lack of agency that his response to having a sense of self was to have it removed.

It wouldn’t be the first time someone like that had strung Dorian along.

Still watching, the Bull let his face soften, and Dorian wanted to look away rather than witness the _pity_ there. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Dorian,” said the Bull, just as horrifyingly tender as his final kiss. “I want you to be happy someday. And I wanted to be able to see you when you began trying to get there.”

Dorian’s voice came out a strangled whisper. “Don’t.”

The Bull smiled then, like he couldn’t help it. “I’m glad I also got to see you survive trying.”

Where Dorian’s prior laugh came cruelly, this one might have been only inches away from crying. Certainly more than a little hysterical. But at least any tears accompanying it could be blamed on the wind in his eyes. “I haven’t survived it yet,” he said.

“You will,” said the Bull, but hoarsely, his face beginning to crumple.

Dorian couldn’t bear to see it. He stepped in to kiss the Bull again. If this had to be their last night together, he might as well make it something worth remembering.

-

 _Draconic [the fire] consumed all it touched save the father of the boy who gave it life/_  
That he should look upon the deathly glow from the north as the sun slipped away/  
And his heart burst aflame to see his son stand proud before it/  
Bathing in the power he yearned for until he, too, was consumed.

_—ending stanza of Lastimus Alexius’ “The Tragedy of House Pavus” (3:41 Towers)_

-

They bid farewell with the dawn.

Dorian had held to the Bull longer than he should have, but the Bull had allowed it even longer. _Don’t make me be the one to let you go,_ Dorian had begged. _It’s most uncouth_. And the Bull had smiled too tight and lingered too long.

Despite his utter exhaustion, Dorian only dozed on and off for a few hours after their parting. Dreams full of fire and the thrashing of dying men, the bloody face of the man he’d thought to be a father all dark shadows in red light, the image of one grey eye glazed over and unseeing, all lurked at the edge of sleep, an impenetrable barrier. He gave up after jarring awake with a ghost of the Bull’s lips, wisp-light, still brushed upon his brow.

The beacon well’s water had done its job, and only faint burns and sore muscles remained to confirm the horrors of the night before. Through the fog still dulling his mind he sat up and contemplated food. The meal Livia had brought him would only go so far, and what then? Fruits and nuts gathered wouldn’t sustain him regardless if he could manage to gather enough in the first place, and he’d never butchered game before. And he couldn’t stay here by the well, not where he could be so easily found. Unsafe and alive would’ve been better than one night of comfort and then starving to death.

But then he wouldn’t have been able to say goodbye.

It hurt. It hurt far more than Dorian could have anticipated. The sense of betrayal had no basis in reason or fairness; he’d always known that their time together was limited, and the Bull had never pretended otherwise. It wasn’t his fault that Dorian had grown so fucking _attached_. So _dependent_. But the worst of it all had little to do with that sense of betrayal. Of all the things he’d expected from their – relationship, of a sort – he’d never imagined feeling this heartbroken at the end of it.

Maybe the Qunari had the right of it. Living within a culture bereft of romance, of family, would never have brought Dorian so much pain or left him untethered like this. He’d have his life planned out for him, but then, he already did. He already lived the consequences. Certainly his family would be no loss, and the Bull had spoken of friendship. But under the Qun, Dorian never would have had the Bull. And somehow, in spite of everything, the Bull had become worth it all.

Dorian scrubbed at his face and stood up too fast; his vision dissolved into stars for a moment and he wavered on his feet. Another point to the restorative properties of the beacon’s water, that Dorian somehow remained standing. One step at a time. He retrieved his clothes from where they’d dried on the ruined wall. Once dressed, he drew up another bucketful of water. He’d have to find another water source sooner rather than later. Whatever had kept beasts away until now, Dorian suspected wouldn’t last much longer.

From a short distance away there came the distinct sound of footsteps through the damp underbrush. Dorian lurched to his feet. Hope seized his throat for unbearable seconds, and without his staff to lean on he surely would have collapsed. But no – the footsteps didn't fall near heavy enough, and there were many at varying intervals.

Wrong place, wrong time. Despite the beacon's restorative water, Dorian yet lacked the balance to make his escape, and his pack lay on the wrong side of the clearing. Oh, he could leave it, but. But he'd lost every other damn thing he had in the fire and what had come after, and the thought of someone taking it from him alone had him bristling in anticipatory rage. There was no knowing who that someone might be. Looters might not care about him, but they also might kill him for getting in the way. Investigators curious or alarmed might be persuaded to leave him alone if they didn't recognise him. But whoever it was approached from the north, and it could be – Dorian shuddered, did not complete the thought. Regardless, he might as well face these interlopers face on.

He balanced himself against his staff covertly as possible. If tested the bluff would fall apart, but if the encounter remained verbal he could at least avoid revealing the extent of his weakness.

The approaching group stepped into the clearing, almost anticlimactic after Dorian's strategising. They bore weapons, but all sheathed or bound – with the exception of one elf's staff, held like a walking stick. For a moment not one of the six of them seemed to notice Dorian, looking past him to – to the well, he realised. Suspicion tugged at the edge of his thoughts. But there was time for that later, after he'd determined whether or not this ragtag team of misfits intended to kill him. Priorities, after all.

He felt the exact moment that one of them -- the other elf, stocky and dark and carrying an alarming array of knives -- registered his presence, tensing up. She hissed some unrecognisable word to the others and then they were all watching Dorian, an assortment of faces ranging from wary on the dark-skinned man on the furthest side from him to downright murderous from the woman who'd spotted him. But – no, the other elven woman wasn't grimacing but, rather, suppressing a smile.

At least someone was getting a good laugh at the situation.

At the front and the back of the party stood two men with impressive mauls, both cross-armed, but the nearer with a cant to his hips. He turned deliberately to face Dorian, expression somewhere between the extremes: disinterested, cool, with only a faint edge. He'd raised his eyebrows. "Not looking so good, are you, altus?"

"I don't recall asking an assessment of you, _soporatus_ ," snapped Dorian. "And for all you know, this could be the latest Minrathian fashion." He punctuated it with a perfected glower, possibly defanged by the swelling of his face.

The man’s lips twitched, though whether in offense or amusement Dorian couldn’t rightly say. “Quick to assume, aren’t you?” His voice came less tight, but hadn’t relaxed at all. “Could be fugitivus. Could be I’m a slave to one of them.” Dorian snorted, and he unbent and twitched at the mouth again. Laughter looked to be the more likely option. “I guess that one’s reaching, a bit.”

So far, no weapons had been drawn, which made it a decent enough time to push further. “Shall we call it an educated guess?” Dorian replied. “Krem, I presume.”

He reacted instantly. Krem dropped his arms, one hand reaching for the haft of his maul, the other held out in defense or readiness to strike. Behind him, Skinner started forward, only barely held back by the dwarf in their number. Now the knives emerged.

The other elf, the one who’d only just failed to hold back a grin at him, smiled once again. This one had teeth. “Oh, don’t try it. You’ll find you’re in over your head.”

Of course. Krem had deserted the army and fled. And now he’d walked into a specific clearing to find an altus – albeit a rather wrung-over one – who happened to know his name; what other assumption could he come to? But Dorian couldn’t back down, not in the face of the only people who also knew the Bull. Instead he brought his free hand up to pacify. “Allow me to back up and attempt civility. It’s absolutely delightful to finally meet you all.” He bowed slightly in place, as much as his balance would allow. “I’ve heard ever so much.”

Krem narrowed his eyes but released his maul, and Skinner stopped trying to wrench free. The man in the back, however, was watching Dorian thoughtfully. “You’ve met the chief, then?” He had the accent of the far, cold south, and the precision of a non-native speaker of Tevene.

“One might say that,” Dorian replied, and Krem snorted. Well, they did know the Bull well enough to arrive at the correct conclusion. Or, rather, knew – and Dorian then needed to pause discretely to swallow down the lump suddenly forming in his throat. “You’ve just missed him, I’m afraid,” he said, once he’d collected himself. “He left to rejoin the Beresaad earlier this morning despite my better judgement. Has he always this unbearably fatalistic?”

Another twitch of Krem’s lips. Dorian would have a smile of him yet. “Part of his charm, sorry to say.”

“He certainly has a lot of that.” Had, Dorian thought, and then sat down on it. Surely they would wait until the hunt ended to reeducate him.

After a long pause, Krem finally relaxed, the others following suit. He seemed to be in charge insomuch as anyone might in such a small operation. “Shit. Too late _again_.”

“We’ve been tracking him for _months_ ,” the friendly elf said, kicking at the ground with one unshod foot. “Every single creepy well. We’d even cracked the pattern.”

“Thought we’d be able to catch up,” Skinner muttered darkly.

Threat mitigated, Dorian sat down heavily on the nearest chunk of wall. The vertigo didn’t return, but his legs shook as if he’d run a race. He’d need another long drink from the beacon, surely, but he needed a rest first. He had no reason to rush. The beacon seemed still to be in working condition.

The big fellow in the back, surely the Avvar by his blonde hair and pale skin and rough-carved features, set his maul roughly down against the wall across the old road and followed it with his pack. The other five took the hint and formed a rough circle with theirs, not including Dorian within the ring but not quite shutting him out. A moment of respite, at least. Dorian let his eyes fall shut, just for a moment, and rode out another wave of panic.

“So you know my name,” Krem said after a while, and Dorian looked up to find himself a subject of observation once again. He nodded and hoped his uncooperative reactions hadn’t shown on his face. But Krem either didn’t care, or didn’t notice. “You know the rest of us?”

Dorian had to think for a moment to remember what he could of the conversation. No other names sprung to mind. “I know Skinner’s name, and I’ve heard a number of anecdotes, but few personal details.” A few rather _too_ personal details, but Krem didn’t need to know that.

“Right.” Krem stepped around one pack and then another, to Dorian’s place on the worn wall. “You first, altus. Name, and how you know the chief.”

“Dorian—” and here he tripped on his tongue. “Well. The rest hardly matters anymore. As for how I met the Iron Bull: I noticed the night the beacon lit, almost a month ago.” He waved a hand in its direction. “I followed it here, and I’m sure you can gather the rest of the story.”

Krem nodded slowly, though he’d raised his eyebrows when Dorian declined to provide a surname. “You know me and Skinner. That clown behind her’s Dalish, the dwarf is Rocky, Stitches is the southerner. Behind him, that’s Grim. We don’t know where he came from but we’re guessing further south than that.” True to the implications of his name, Grim didn’t smile, only grunted acknowledgment. “We’re the Char—”

“Hang on,” Dalish cut in, “Dorian, isn’t it? Did you say the chief was here for _over a month_?”

“Almost a month,” Dorian corrected, absently.

She frowned and looked back at Grim, who nodded once. When she turned around again, her concern had deepened. “He’s not supposed to do that.”

It was on the tip of Dorian’s tongue to comment on the fact that the Bull didn’t seem to care much for what one was _supposed_ to do – but no, that wasn’t true, not where his own life was concerned. The Qun, then. “He said he’d finished lighting the beacons, and was waiting around to be picked up by the Beresaad. I had thought he’d simply wait here, but…”

None of these people would care if they knew, but Dorian did. The Bull’s farewell, that final moment of honest care and the kiss with which Dorian had tried to confess all his remaining secrets – that was Dorian’s memory to hold.

At any rate, no one seemed to find much significance in the way he’d trailed off. Krem was frowning too, now. To Dorian’s raised eyebrows, he explained: “He told us that once he finished setting up these lights, he was supposed to report back at once with the main force out to sea. No time to tie up loose ends. That’s why he didn’t let us tag along.”

_…if they think you a corrupting influence, the best thing that happens is they kill you._

“He directly disobeyed the Qun’s orders,” Dorian said, slowly. “It’s more than a day’s _ride_ to the coast.”

Krem kicked the wall, aghast. “Fuck! He’s not rejoining, he’s _turning himself in_!”

Hearing it spoken hit harder than thinking it. It staggered Dorian for a moment as it settled in his head – and then he stood with sudden purpose on legs that bore his weight. “I suppose there’s nothing for it, then,” he said, scuffing his hands together. “We’ll have to rescue him.”

“Damn right we will!” Dalish yelled, punching the air and then clapping her hand against Rocky’s. Krem opened his mouth, then closed it.

“Chargers?” he asked. “All against?”

Not one hand went up. He turned back to Dorian with a grin. “Right, that answers that.”

Dorian fetched another bucket of water as he’d intended, and then they all took places in a lopsided circle. The Chargers had left him a spot against the wall. Apparently he hadn’t bluffed well enough after all.

“We know they’re coming from the north and heading west,” Stitches said. “Chief was complaining about how he couldn’t stop for a bite to eat in Vyrantium.”

“Told him he wasn’t missing out,” Skinner contributes.

Stitches snorted. “And we just came from the next one down.”

Krem nodded along with him. “Think we can make it there before night?” He looked around the circle to a few more nods. Skinner shrugged, and Grim grunted.

“I can’t,” Dorian had to admit. “Not if you’d like me to be of use. I’d rather stay here anyway.”

“So we’ll have the mage in the front.” Dalish grinned; Skinner leaned over to hit her in the head with her own staff. “I told you, it’s a bow!”

“Rocky’s with me,” Krem said, loudly. “So he doesn’t blow the chief up by accident.”

Stitches looked back to Dorian with a rueful smile. Dorian twisted his mouth in lieu of returning it. It was a pretty transparent attempt to include him, but he appreciated it in the moment. “You know any healing?” Stitches asked.

“Enough,” Dorian replied. Not strictly true in terms of his own magic, but he’d seen firsthand what the beacon could do. For that matter, despite his worries he hadn’t felt hunger at all. Mostly likely this explained why the Bull had never eaten in his presence. “The beacon does actually function as a well, and the water has rather impressive properties.”

“You’ll have to tell me more.” Stitches made as if to continue, but stopped himself. “After we rescue the Chief. I’ll stick to what I know for now.”

In the end the consensus was made to have Grim and Skinner fill out the vanguard with Dorian, with the remaining four camping out at the next beacon down the line. Stitches pointedly mentioned a sleep potion he’d brewed to avoid the usual grogginess upon waking up, so Dorian sighed and accepted a sample. He drifted off to the rise and fall of conversation, and when he woke the sun had traveled far across the sky, and the clearing was all but silent.

Night fell too slowly, the dusk lingering well past its welcome. Dorian paced, rubbed the shiny patches where his skin had burned, and after a moment of thought drew another bucket of water from the beacon. Some he splashed against his face, but some he drank – it probably wouldn’t do to develop a reliance, not being Qunari as he was, but he’d need to be as near his full strength tonight as possible. Whatever happened, he wouldn’t need to use it again.

For good measure, he dumped another bucketful over his head.

Skinner stalked the perimeter of the clearing and fiddled with a knife; Grim stood where the ancient roads crossed, where the Bull had made his fires, where they had sat so many times, where the Bull had fucked him, twice now, maybe never again.

Dorian lifted a hand to touch the pauldron, still somewhat flattened against his chest. Nothing but a token.

At the advent of true darkness, Dorian took up his position just behind the boundary of the old wall, Skinner to his side, Grim across the road. His hands flexed, wanting his staff to grip, though he would almost certainly need both hands free to drag the Bull from the hunt; if Skinner couldn’t get the staff to him, Dorian would simply have to do without.

The charge of adrenaline interrupted his efforts at grounding himself. Above shone the beacon’s glowing trail, the only source of light now. It drained of colour all Dorian could see. Time didn’t stop, but it could have, for the stillness in the clearing.

And then the rush of wind, force of a gale, roared in and shoved all three of them over. Dorian clambered to his feet, fighting the wind all the way up, just in time for the hunt to burst into view on the ruins of the ancient road.

The wind carried an overpowering humidity. It left Dorian damp, but the skin of the bare-chested Qunari glistened wet in the light of the beacon. All clad in red cloth and brown leather, faces and chests and arms painted in blocky, geometric shapes, the Beresaad made an intimidating force. Five marched abreast to each row, in perfect step, any sound swallowed by the wind – the north wind. The harsh blue light muddled their faces. With only horns to differentiate them, would the Bull even show up in their midst?

Despair welled within Dorian’s ribcage as his frantic search yielded nothing. Thick horns and delicate, straight or curling, but none the right shape. No eyepatch Dorian could see, no thick gut, no favor tied to the strap of a shoulder brace—

And then he came into view.

Skinner swore fouler than a sailor, but Dorian didn’t need the signal. There, in a gap in the ranks, walked the Bull. But there was no determined warrior in him now. His head hung, and no paint decorated his skin. His shoulders hunched forward and – _venhedis_ – chains bound his gentle hands together.

 _Tal-Vashoth_.

“Go!” yelled Skinner. “And you better not fuck this up, altus!” Over the wind Dorian heard the scrape of metal, and caught a glimpse of a spray of sparks that implied the _or else_. No need, of course. He was, after all, a mage of Tevinter, and if he had nothing else he could still play the cocky altus, entitled to go anywhere and get away with anything by the virtue of the birthright around his neck. Or, perhaps, the prodigal student, in perfect control of magic, mind, and body. Confident in his power. Risen above all those who felt threatened by his success. Just a less rattled version of himself taking one stride forward, one stride more. Another. Another.

A shock, just as Dorian hit upon a barrier he hadn’t detected: an unfamiliar and _wrong_ magic roiled against his hand, thick like the heavy heat the wind carried. Something in it rang familiar, though. The hum of a spell Dorian knew in his very marrow. A memory from one of the good years, lost to him now: in an outdoor courtyard, stone-tiled to form a wide glyph of containment, he faced off against a woman so dark she could have been Rivaini. _Fear need not be a weakness, as well you know,_ she’d said. _I will teach you to craft a weapon of it._

To deter an enemy, but perhaps more importantly to contain the soldiers of the Beresaad within. Fortunate, then, how Dorian knew all about crossing boundaries.

No scent of blood touched him here. He stepped over the line of the barrier.

The magic struck immediately upon Dorian once within it, a surge of shadowed demons and their glowing eyes. The heat of rage, the freeze of despair, the jerking, stilted movement of fear. It raked claws down his neck, and now Dorian tasted blood, gagged on it. The fear demon swatted him away, straight into the arms of a corpse, escaping only into the grip of a vast demon of pride and its cruel laughter.

Madness. But the fear was not his.

The demon Fear took him again, and the claws it wrapped around Dorian’s throat were hands large and rough, and he looked up to the face of no demon but the Bull, dead-eyed and shackled. His thumbs dug into the arteries, cutting off Dorian’s air. But – _no_. This wasn’t the Bull, not yet. This was what Dorian was here to prevent, or die trying, and he _really_ didn’t want to die trying.

Somewhere beyond the nightmare, the Bull still marched away from him. Too much longer and he’d be gone. It took the air from Dorian’s lungs in a solid sensation, and the false Bull’s hand lost substance as if it had never been. No, the pain in Dorian’s chest stabbed at him, ached, and cut through the haze of magic mimicking the brand of madness that the Qunari so feared. But it wasn’t Dorian’s nightmare. Dorian already lived that. No spell could ever hope to match the potency of his own terror.

 _Make a weapon of it._ Dorian braced himself, then shoved through the phantoms around him and the barrier holding them in.

The Bull had moved further along the clearing road while Dorian was otherwise preoccupied. As Dorian broke into a run, he registered abrupt movement to his right, and in the moment he glanced to the side he met the eyes of the soldier nearest him, who could apparently see him now. _Shit._

He picked up his pace and kept his eyes ahead, on the Bull, but he could hear irregular footsteps behind him. They didn’t matter. Only the shrinking distance between Dorian and the Bull had any significance, the entirety of a vast world shrunk to barely fit them. Dorian’s sides screamed, his lungs burned with exertion, but momentum and desperation were all the advantage he had right now. If he stopped, if he slowed, if he let himself think, it would all be over. So he pushed through it, another burst of speed from shaky legs, five marching rows until the gap, then three, then one, and then—

—lurched sharply sideways to collide with the Bull, enough force to stagger him.

Dorian nearly fell over, clutching at the Bull’s arm almost too late. As he righted himself, the Bull looked up with shock written all across his features, and in the way he reached out to twist his bound fingers in Dorian’s robe. “Dorian, what--” the Bull began, but the culmination of that desperate sprint had overcome Dorian, who couldn’t act but to drag the Bull’s face down to roughly kiss him.

It took on heat. Dorian bit at the Bull’s lips until they parted, and then slotted their mouths together with no consideration for form, only contact. It still wasn’t enough. Shackled, the Bull could only open to him, but in this case Dorian had all intention of assuming control.

There wasn’t time, only rapid seconds until they were besieged on all sides. Dorian had counted on this. He drew on the Bull’s lower lip with his teeth for the ensuing swell, and measured the tremor of heavy footsteps bearing down on them, the number and the nearness, until he heard the swing of a sword, the grunt of an axe lifted—

Dorian _slammed_ magic out from himself in a shockwave, pushing the Qunari around them back, felling some. The sound of it had the Bull jerk back from the kiss, but Dorian didn’t give him time to react. He conjured up a shield in one forceful yank, tugging on the Bull’s horns simultaneously, and they stumbled out of line, back toward the barrier. The first blows shivered Dorian’s shield.

“Are you trying to get yourself _killed_?” the Bull demanded, too late to hold his ground. Rather than reply, Dorian pressed his hands to his shield, bolstering it just in time for the strike of a heavy maul. “ _Dorian_ ,” said the Bull, knocking Dorian’s shoulder with his own, all tender and despairing of voice. It was too much. Dorian couldn’t bring himself to turn around and see it all on the Bull’s face, and had to shut his eyes when the Bull continued speaking. “Dorian, if you do this, I’ll go Tal-Vashoth.”

“If I don’t,” Dorian said through clenched teeth, on the faint chance he might disguise the frantic edge to his voice that wanted to show through, “it’ll break you, and probably kill you.”

The Bull made no such attempt. “If you do, I _will_ break, and definitelykill _you_. I wouldn’t even know who you were.”

Madness, he’d said. Without purpose, no sentience, no control. Once one broke away from the Qun, the change was inevitable. But behind them the barrier swirled, the same stuff of the beacon’s mist, only inches from Dorian’s shield. It couldn’t do anything worse than what Dorian had already survived, or what the Bull would not.

It was easy to justify even the most horrific acts in the name of the helping someone.

Another rattling blow shivered his shield, but Dorian split his focus to open his eyes and wrench himself around. He’d expected to see anger or at least frustration, but the widened eye and the upward press of the Bull’s brow hit him as forcibly as the next attack. That fear hadn’t been directed inward at all.

Helplessly Dorian’s chest tightened all over again, and he took the Bull's shackled wrists in his hands. "Bull," he said, helplessly afraid, desperate in his determination, and sure that it showed in his face. "Please. Trust me."

Something softened in the Bull's expression, and Dorian only barely restrained himself from initiating another kiss around the pang of longing come over him. "Kadan," said the Bull, softly, as he bent his neck to touch his forehead to Dorian's. "That’s never been a problem."

There was only so much that Dorian could take. He let go the Bull’s wrists to bracket the Bull’s face in both hands and kiss him again hard and fierce – let his hands fall to the Bull’s chest, just to touch. A moment of grounding before he pulled the shield tighter around them to strengthen it.

Dorian breathed a prayer, and shoved it out again.

It buckled against the onslaught, Qunari of the Beresaad bearing down on them from all sides but behind, and Dorian had to release the Bull to hold the shield together with both hands in lieu of a staff’s focus. The magic ripped through him, screaming through muscle and ligament. He allowed the Qunari to push them back – relied upon it – but each glancing blow shuddered the shield and jarred through his bones.

A warm pressure behind him; the Bull had turned around to support Dorian against his back. Dorian sagged back against him. The reprieve wouldn't last long, but he'd take what he could get.

There – the prickling in Dorian's skin and through his head. The edge of the barrier. He had only a moment to widen his shield and pull up a second around the Bull before someone else’s shield – of metal, rather than magic – over the edge of the barrier.

The Bull cried out; Dorian didn't look back. All he had to do was hold his shield up and pull back whenever he could spare the focus until Grim made it through or Skinner brought him his staff, whichever came first.

Only they hadn’t yet, when they ought to have followed just behind him. Had they been caught entering the barrier – had they failed to enter at all? Or had they been cut down before ever reaching him?

Another blow fell, and Dorian brought himself back to focus only on his shields again. All he could do was keep the Bull and ideally himself alive and untouched for as long as he could. Never mind that the span of time he could keep up his spells was trickling ever downward.

 _Come on, Skinner._ Holding both shields without a staff, strong enough to withstand the full strain of Qunari might, soaked up his magic as a sponge might water. His skull could have split for the pain that lanced through it. And surely their attackers could see Dorian burning out; they needed only to batter his shield, wear him down. That, or distract him long enough that he’d lose his focus on the Bull’s shield.

He bit his lip and held on, at the fore of the enclosed space he’d created. Dorian had no way of knowing if he would be able to sustain both shields upon re-entering the panic spell; he had to stay out of it as long as possible and push the Bull’s shield through the barrier before following after.

There was nothing for it but to split his focus further, backing the Bull against the rear of the outer shield’s dome. Pain bloomed further in Dorian’s head and faded to a lasting throb; he bit down against it. Drained as he was, he had to take one hand from the shield’s edge and physically shove it behind him, shifting to his side to ground both arms. Dorian took a slow step back to move both shields with him, and the outer dragged closer, setting his whole body to screaming.

His lip split between his teeth. Blood flooded his mouth. No, no, this couldn’t happen now, he couldn’t fall apart now – he wasn’t there anymore – but thick and heavy hung the smoke and the blood in the air, pouring in through his nose – he couldn’t move. Paralysis bound him within the glyph, unable to look away from Gallus stepping forward into Halward Pavus’ knife.

Behind him the exploding wall flung cracked marble, striking his head, his spine, his head again. The pain brought with it an instant of dull clarity that this was somehow wrong, and he looked up to his father’s cruel laughter, bloody hands and chest, and the glyphs all lit up--

\--and then cold water drenched him, and the smell of blood and smoke vanished with his father, leaving only a dull metallic tang on his tongue. Something prodded Dorian in the ribs, and he turned all the way back to find the focus of his staff extending through the rear of his shield to the left of the Bull. He blinked at it and it remained in place. He must have slipped into the barrier without noticing, somewhere between the blood in his mouth and the moment he’d frozen in place. He must have lost his footing. But somehow his shields hadn’t faltered.

“You gonna take it or what?” yelled Skinner from the other side of the barrier. “I gotta get in to get Grim, and I can’t do that with a stick in my hand!”

Dorian took the staff numbly, then stumbled with two more jolts of pain struck the back of his head. Both shields shattered at once. He spun around to face the soldier who rushed him, shouting incoherently, sure of his imminent death – the sword stabbed for his chest – but it skidded off the pauldron Dorian had hung around his neck, the old leather somehow strong enough to stop a killing blow. He staggered back, the swordsman advanced, and—

A dripping Skinner burst in at his right, full bucket in hand. Clutching it, she ducked and wove through the ranks of the Beresaad. The distraction lasted only a moment, but it was enough. Dorian tightened his grip on the staff and swung it in an arc over his head and _down_ to plant it by the blade in front of him, shield exploding back to life around him. The next blow he hardly felt at all.

Behind him, a voice, winded. Sharp hope crackled through him; Dorian shoved it aside. He was midway through creating another internal barrier when the words repeated, more insistent and loud enough to discern. “Dorian –  what just happened?”

 

(art by [Brinanners](http://brinanners.tumblr.com))

 

Dorian resisted barely the urge to turn to him, summoning a wall of fire to drive what part of the attack he could. He managed to pull the shield an additional few steps back before hearing a very human bellow followed by piercing Tevene curse. Dorian dispelled the flames, and Grim charged into the halted hunt, Skinner darting in after, both of them soaked.

“Go!” she shouted, retrieving a knife from a downed Qunari and nearly getting gutted for her troubles. Dorian froze her second assailant, and she spared an instant to glare back. “Fuck off, altus!”

“Skinner?” asked the Bull behind Dorian, but Dorian was busy throwing shields up around Skinner and Grim before hauling his own backward again. One step, as before. Another. Another. Until he hit something solid as rock, which could only be the barrier.

Both Skinner and Grim hadn’t been able to enter before soaking themselves; Dorian had already been drenched with the beacon’s water before making his own entrance. But he’d dried, and Skinner and Grim had probably sweated theirs away. There had to be another way.

There was.

Dorian inhaled deeply. “Grim, Skinner!” he called over the clash of battle. “Fall back!”

They didn’t seem to hear. Muttering a curse, he summoned another wall of fire behind them. This time when he shouted, they looked back. “To me!”

Grim carved himself a space to move forward, Skinner running ahead to cover him. Time slowed as Dorian counted his hammering heartbeats. Eleven, and a gash opened up on Grim’s shoulder. Twelve, and Skinner returned it with a slash across his attacker’s arm. Fifteen, and Grim swung on with a roar.

It seemed an age waiting for them to reach the shield, Dorian forcing himself to breathe while the Bull tensed behind him. Grim parried a greataxe, Skinner ducked underneath. One more swing of Grim’s maul, and then they’d made it.

Dorian dropped his shield.

In anticipation Grim and Skinner closed ranks with Dorian and the Bull for one last shield. A moment to brace himself, closing a hand around the Bull’s arm, and he summoned to the fore that moment he’d been hiding from, the disinterest in his father’s eyes swimming into focus before him. Gallus, between them, dropping dead once again to the floor.

Panic and horror rose in him and cut off his air, but this time Dorian didn’t freeze. He knew this spell. Magic welled in him, around him, and with all the strength Dorian had he drew it around the glyph that contained him and _slammed_ out.

Something tore apart behind him. The barrier, he remembered, and then he saw Skinner and Grim instead of his father. His hand still had a death grip on the Bull’s arm. One last shove of his shield, in case it could hold the barrier open just a moment longer. With the last fumes of his magic he sliced apart the chains binding the cuffs at the Bull’s wrist.

“Everyone through!” he said, voice strained all over again. “We haven’t all night!”

Grim and Skinner were quick to duck out, but the Bull hesitated. Before he could do something catastrophic like saying Dorian’s name, Dorian shoved him. “Don’t,” he snapped, “don’t do it. Whatever you’re about to say can wait until we’re out.”

For a moment he thought the Bull might brush him off – but instead the Bull took him by the arm and hauled them both forward.

Dorian staggered free of the barrier and when the Bull released his arm he stumbled a few steps more before his legs collapsed under him. Before the Bull could do more than start in his direction, Grim had stepped in under Dorian’s arm to hold him up. As if it had never been disturbed, the hunt roared by, a vast noise, and then all at once it passed out of sight at the end of the old road, and the clearing fell utterly silent.

"Are you—” The Bull couldn't seem to finish his question.

"I'll survive," Dorian replied around the exertion and the adrenaline that seized him yet. "Better out than in, as they say." A brief twitch of the Bull's mouth, his sense of humor still not entirely lost; behind him Skinner snickered.

The Bull did reach him then, and Grim grunted in his expressive way and retreated. Then it was just the two of them, breathing hard in the still air, until the Bull abruptly pulled Dorian into him for a crushing embrace. Dorian tensed in sudden panic. Slowly, though, the Bull’s solidity and warmth soothed him, and Dorian reached up to settle his hands on the Bull’s chest and press his face just below.

“I did tell you,” he said, thus muffled, “you could trust me.”

The Bull’s laugh came without much humour, and he tightened his grip around Dorian all the more with it. “Dorian.” He exhaled slowly, and then spared a hand to tangle into the hair at the back of Dorian's head until their eyes could meet. "Kadan."

“I will catch up with the others,” Skinner announced.

Dorian barely noticed. "You needn't thank me, you know. Having you around has, I regret, become rather a priori—"

" _Dorian_." So softly the Bull's voice cut him off, before he could work himself into a full nervous babble. "I've trusted you for a long time already."

"As it happens, the reverse is also true," Dorian said, and just like that, his anxiety trickled away. a sense of certainty came to him as he spoke. Here they were, the both of them free in spite of everything, and _Dorian_ had done this. And he hadn’t done it alone. “It seems you require someone to take care of _you_ , on occasion.”

“You applying for the job?” the Bull asked, and Dorian laughed all the way into a kiss.

“Try keeping me away.”

-

_…and so Dorian walked away with the Iron Bull and his soldiers, and disappeared with them into the southern territories. As for their further adventures, no more remain to history – but no story ever truly ends._

Amelior Aclassi, _A Compilation of Workmen’s Legends_

-

_In the end there is no proving the origin of the tale, no matter how diligently researched and painstakingly deconstructed each variant may be. Patterns may certainly be drawn; in the upper classes the tellings favor tragedy and morality, whereas lower and working classes tend toward an outside look at the foibles of nobility and the exploration of clashing personalities. The sins of the son vary with the ages with differing fears and focus. But in the end, much like the story itself, there remains nothing of him but scrap and stories – the true heir of House Pavus long lost to the wind._

**Author's Note:**

> With great thanks to:
> 
> Hominus Tofitia, fellow scholar of ancient Thedosian legend, great muse, greater friend  
> Brianes Asinum, contributing artist and painstaking editor  
> Rissa Plaudeme, last minute savior  
> Samantia Solistenum, in utmost solidarity  
> And, foremost and finally, the Turma Sitis; a greater cohort no scholar could ever hope to find.


End file.
